


Comment Catapult

by aliaoftwoworlds



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Tower Shenanigans, additional tags to come as the story progresses, also mentions of other story universes of mine, mentions of various mcu movies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23209180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliaoftwoworlds/pseuds/aliaoftwoworlds
Summary: A writing exercise in which the readers choose the story and the author’s job is to take every suggestion and make it into one coherent story. The only guarantee is a focus on Tony.
Comments: 49
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Pandemic lockdown writing marathon time! I hope everyone is staying healthy and dealing as well as they can with all the current craziness. Perhaps this will help take your mind off of things.
> 
> So I got this idea from Disasteriffic Kaz here on AO3, I used to read their amazing Supernatural stories back when I was more involved in that fandom (and sometimes still go back to reread them because they're awesome). They have a few of these Reader’s Specials (and if anyone is also a fan of spn I’d definitely suggest checking them out!) and they always turned out really cool. I’m hoping this is a cool writing exercise for me and fun for all of you who read my stories!

Before we start the actual story, there are some general rules and setup things I need to get out of the way first. The story will start with a very short intro chapter that I wrote on my own, and from there, all of the plot and general details will be coming from the comments (except for what I might need to add in order to connect one suggestion to another, of course). Your job is to comment with what you’d like to see happen in the next chapter, and my job is to make everyone’s suggestions happen in a way that makes sense and, hopefully, makes for an entertaining story.

That being said, obviously there needs to be some general rules for comments so that I don’t get stuck in impossible challenges or uncomfortable situations. If something comes up I may add a rule or two, but for now, here they are:

1\. No asking for the death, major/permanent injury, coma, etc. of any major or minor character (basically the only situation where asking for death is okay is nameless side characters, ie “character X goes camping and while they’re there, someone drowns in the lake and the campground is closed off for investigation,” that sort of thing).

2\. Asking for established characters or original characters to appear is okay, but no sudden relations. No asking for a character to have a child, discover a long-lost parent/child/sibling, or suddenly find out they’re related to another character.

3\. Similarly to 2, no asking for romantic pairings of any characters unless they are 100% established, never-broken canon relationships (I’m talking Howard and Maria Stark (and you all know I’m not a comic person so shhh about that), not Tony and Pepper, for example). Once again, this is with the exception of random side characters, such as “cute old couple approaches character X in the park to ask for a picture with them.” Similarly, nothing X-rated.

4\. It’s okay to ask for a character you don’t like to maybe be put in an embarrassing situation or face some consequences for a dumb decision, but don’t ask for anything extreme (a charater to be put in prison, for example) or ask for outright character bashing (no “character X verbally shreds character Y and then throws them out on the street to general applause,” even if it would be highly satisfying).

5\. It’s generally better to keep a request as simple as possible, so that it can be worked in around other requests and the plot can flow around it. It’s better to say “character X goes to the beach with character Y and there’s a bad storm,” for example, than to write a three-paragraph plotline where the characters go to the beach and hailstones smash their car up and they have to walk to the nearest gas station and then they’re kidnapped while waiting for their ride and have to break free and walk home and they adopt a puppy on the way. I know there are often a lot of details you want to include, but if it’s too complicated, I won’t be able to work it in with everything else. You can leave multiple simple suggestions in one comment/multiple comments, but if they get excessive I may ask you to pick one or two to focus on.

6\. Since this is an MCU-specific fic and Tony-focused, obviously your suggestions can (and should) include Tony and other MCU characters. However, no characters from other marvel franchises (like the X-Men, for example), just because I don’t know them well enough to write about any of them specifically, and no one from the Ant-Man movies with the exception of Scott (again, just because I haven’t seen those movies and don’t know the characters, sorry). Also, no crossovers with any other movies, shows, etc.

7\. Nothing too unbelievable or fantastic. Since this is the MCU, where magic is a thing and Tony’s tech can do practically anything, clearly there are wide limits to what’s generally considered “unbelievable.” But don’t ask for something like “Character X suddenly gets powers so amazing they can easily hold all of the Infinity Stones and cure cancer and disintegrate planets with just a thought.” Similarly, “Tony goes on a three-day engineering binge and creates a robotic unicorn that can fly around a room” is a reasonable suggestion, while “Steve rides in to Avengers Tower on a real unicorn one day and says he found it on his daily jog through the forest and it grants wishes” isn’t. 

8\. Respect each other’s comments and suggestions! Don’t go on someone else’s comment to say their idea is stupid or that they should change it to something else. Also, if you like someone’s idea and want to build off of it or have something related happen, you can feel free to reply directly to their comment, but I ask that you don’t start building off each other back and forth until you’ve created a whole story (that’s my job!).

9\. Since I eventually need time to actually plan and write each chapter, there’s going to be a limit on when I can accept comments after each chapter. I may change it, but for right now I’m setting it at 2 days, with the goal of putting out one chapter of this every 5-6 days. Therefore, if you comment on a chapter more than three days after it’s been posted, I unfortunately won’t be able to work in your suggestion, and it won’t automatically be added in to the next chapter’s suggestions, so if you still want it to happen, you’ll have to comment again on the newest chapter.

Keep in mind, no one is going to punish you if you suggest something that’s against one of the rules; I’ll simply reply letting you know that it’s unfortunately not going to be possible. So if you’re not sure if something is against the rules, just comment anyway and I’ll tell you. 

Last note: Kaz does these amazing oneshot reward stories for people who participate in the reader’s specials. I would absolutely love to do the same thing, though it honestly depends on the level of participation I get in this. I wouldn’t want to promise anything and then have 100+ reward stories to write, making some people wait months or even years for theirs (unless they’re cool with that, I don’t know, we’ll figure it out). In case we can do that, please be logged in when you comment or use a little screenname/nickname with your comment so I can track you down later to potentially ask what you’d like your reward story to be!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the end of every chapter, I will put in a reminder to review the rules of the comment suggestions, plus an update if I change or add any rules. Happy story planning!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just the very short little beginner I wrote. From now on it will be your comments and suggestions!

Tony woke suddenly, which was fairly unusual for the type of dead sleep that typically followed several days in the workshop. He’d had a few lucky days with no meetings and annoyances and had been mostly free to work and create on his own time. That, of course, led to things like forgetting what time it was and surviving only on protein shakes and healthy snacks.

He lay in bed for a few minutes, trying to recall the dream that was rapidly slipping out of his grasp. Details eluded him, and after a minute he couldn’t even remember the most basic bits of it. He had the distinct feeling it was very strange—not necessarily good or bad, just… odd.

Eventually, giving up on remembering the dream, he forced himself out of bed and into the bathroom to get ready for the day. He felt a little more human after showering, shaving, and dressing, but there was still an odd feeling following him around.

Sometimes he could swear that his dreams were prophetic, not in their specific content, but just their feelings. The strange ones sometimes preceded the weirdest days.

He could only hope this wouldn’t be one of those.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you want to happen next? Friends coming over? Enemies? Fluff or danger, Mundane or very strange, it’s all up to you!
> 
> Please remember to review the rules, which can be found in chapter 1.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait on this chapter, I swear I want to post more often. I got all of the comments in, planned the chapter out, and then completely lost writing inspiration for six days straight for some reason. I also started one of my online courses, plus this chapter ended up being way longer than I originally thought it would be, so it took longer to write than planned. I do intend to try to keep it to a week max per chapter, though that may not always happen.
> 
> Also thank you all so much for contributing! My greatest fear was the awkward “well, I got two comments so I’m basically just writing my own story with a tiny bit of input,” but that was not the case at all here. I hope I did justice to all of your prompts, and to anyone I contacted back for clarification, thank you for answering! Keep prompting and we’ll have an insane rambling story in no time!

Tony eyed his bed as he came back into the bedroom after dressing, still thinking about the elusive weird dream. Apparently he stared for a bit too long, because JARVIS spoke up. “Thinking of going back to bed, sir?”

Tony blinked himself out of his trance and let out a thoughtful hum. “Ever have weird dreams, J?”

There was a slightly hesitant pause. “I’m afraid I’ve never experienced dreaming, sir. I can provide you with information on it, but dreams require sleep and a subconscious, neither of which apply to me.”

“Right.” Tony turned to grab a half-repaired gauntlet sitting on the desk in his room, slipping it onto his hand and fiddling with it absently. “Guess you’re not exactly keeping a dream journal.”

“Is there something prompting this inquiry?”

“Weird dreams,” Tony muttered. Even to JARVIS, his most trusted confidant, he felt a little silly confessing that. Still, who else would he tell about his dreams? “Guess you’re not the best person to tell.”

“I am always here to listen, sir, despite my personal lack of experience with the subject. Perhaps, if you would like to explore the subject, you might find a human companion to discuss it with.” It was said with that dry sort of exasperation that told Tony JARVIS knew very well he wouldn’t be running to any human anytime soon to talk about his dreams.

“Think it’d be easier to just code you a subconscious.”

“Were it anyone else, I would debate the validity of that statement, sir. Considering your personal history with sharing sensitive information with others, however, I must say I agree.”

Tony had been joking, but besides an unamused glance at the nearest camera for that bit of teasing about his lack of social skills, Tony didn’t react to the rest of JARVIS’s sentence, too busy staring thoughtfully at the gauntlet on his hand. If he could build a suit of armor as advanced as Iron Man, if he could code a personality that learned and grew like any other person…

“Hm, right as always, as long as you’re agreeing with me.” Tony peeled open a panel on the gauntlet and looked at some of the broken wiring critically. “Maybe it’s time to start a new project. Code some upgrades. I already created a conscious mind, how hard can a subconscious be?”

JARVIS gave a close approximation to a stifled long-suffering sigh. “I would state some of the many flaws with that statement, sir, though I doubt you’ll listen to them. However, before embarking on any new lengthy projects, perhaps you might want to check on your current ones? Your work from last night is attempting to leave the lab.”

Tony’s head shot up at that. “Last night?” He didn’t actually remember what he was doing last night. He’d been so far into the engineering trance, with so little sleep in his three free days, that the last six or so hours had been pretty much a blur. He hardly remembered dragging himself up to bed at JARVIS’s gentle insistence. And in fact, now that he thought about it, what he did remember might have come from a previous night.

He did, however, distinctly remember the reactions of both Pepper and the Avengers the last time one of his caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived projects got loose in the Tower. They’d found pieces of shredded socks in various appliances for weeks afterward. Tony still wasn’t quite sure what had gone wrong. Or exactly what the thing was supposed to do in the first place.

“Better go and check, then,” Tony said, closing up the broken gauntlet but leaving it on his hand as he left his room to head for the elevator down to his private lab. “Can’t leave any of the kids alone for long.”

“Indeed, sir.”

He laughed when he got down to the lab. His latest creation was indeed trying to leave it, walking around mostly blindly, picking random things up and putting them down again. It was like a slightly less clumsy DUM-E.

A few months ago, he’d created a basic humanoid robotic body based off of himself. The idea was to have something remote that he and JARVIS could control to test certain functions of the more radical Iron Man suit redesigns. It was a passable human body, really, in size and shape at least, with robotic features that were realistic enough to look advanced while not too much to creep Tony out when he had to look at it.

Usually, it stood alone in a corner, ready to be loaded into a suit and remotely controlled when it was needed. Tony hadn’t ever given it any intelligence, even a rudimentary one, of its own, since he only used it for suit tests and it was directly controlled by either himself or JARVIS in those instances.

Apparently that had changed last night. In his truly sleep-deprived creation high, he’d evidently decided that the thing needed the capability of independent movement. From the way it was moving, exploring its surroundings but without any truly purposeful actions yet, he had a feeling he knew what he’d done.

As a simplistic base code for his various AIs and ideas, Tony had stored away a copy of the most basic subroutines required to create learning. The knowledge and intelligence he pre-loaded into any AI came separately, as did personality, which was really the most difficult part of any of them. It wasn’t that hard to get a mechanical device to use logic and experimentation to take in, assimilate, and learn from information. Coding emotions, quirks, preferences, and all of the other little things that made an AI truly human was the hard part.

Clearly, he’d put only that very basic learning software into this one. Maybe he wanted to see what would happen if he gave something the ability to learn with no automatic knowledge store or personality. Or maybe he was planning to add those in later. He had no idea.

It was almost endearing, the way the thing walked around and tried to explore its environment. Tony could see, though, how to anyone else, it would probably appear creepy as hell, and he smiled to himself as an idea formed.

“J, you still have a connection to the prototype tester, right?”

“I do, sir. Would you like me to shut it down?”

Tony shook his head, the smile growing. “And kill our little baby right as it’s taking its first steps? JARVIS, how terrible you are.”

“If you intend to complete the prototype’s transformation into a true android, then you will need to build another body for suit testing,” JARVIS said. Always the logical one. “Unless you intend to convince it to keep testing the suits for you?”

Tony put a hand over his heart in mock outrage. “That would be cruel! Besides, I intend to do nothing of the sort. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking last night, but it’s going back to being inanimate… once I’ve had a little fun with it.”

This time JARVIS very clearly sighed.

“I believe the team set a three day limit for how long I was allowed to lock myself in the lab and not come out and make human contact?” Tony didn’t really need the confirmation, he just wanted JARVIS to say it for the dramatics.

JARVIS did not disappoint. He never did. “They did indeed, sir. If you do not appear upstairs for breakfast in the next 30 minutes, I do believe they will send someone down to retrieve you. I might also remind you that per your own orders, my protocols will force me to allow them entry even if you protest it at the time.”

Tony grinned. “So let’s keep them a little busy. I want to finish working on that independent rotational stabilizer before I get dragged anywhere. Let Spock’s Brain over there out of the lab, and when it gets to the elevator, make sure it gets let out on the common floor.”

“Causing trouble, are we?”

Tony chuckled. JARVIS could pretend to disapprove, but Tony knew he was on his side. “You’ll still have a connection to it anywhere in the Tower, right?”

“Of course.”

“Feel free to take over. You know, when it’s _appropriate_.”

JARVIS could, technically, choose to interpret that however he wanted, but Tony knew that his intentions would be heard and honored. JARVIS liked to pretend to be completely rational and firmly against mischief, but Tony knew better than that. Maybe Tony’s sense of childish fun had rubbed off on him over time. It could have been that Tony made him in the first place, but he wasn’t that mischievous when he was newly created. Some of that had come with time.

Tony turned to his desk and he gave his last instruction. “Clue me in when you’re taking over. Have to observe the experiment in progress.” 

“As you wish, sir.”

With that, Tony turned his attention to the stabilizer—thankfully, he hadn’t touched it last night when he was on his irrational creation binge. He’d nearly forgotten about the roaming robot by the time JARVIS interrupted his work with a screen popping up, showing the security feed into the common floor’s kitchen, where the rest of the team was gathered around what was obviously breakfast.

Tony glanced over with moderate interest, still engrossed in his work, but ended up abandoning his project completely to fall over himself laughing when he saw the video. 

“Five more minutes and someone has to go drag Tony out of the lab,” Natasha said as she loaded a plate with freshly cut fruit. Steve, at the stove cooking way too many eggs—except that it would end up being the perfect amount because Steve always managed to eat more than Tony thought possible—shook his head, clearly exasperated.

The screen split into two parts, then, showing the hallway outside the kitchen on one side and inside the kitchen on the other. The robot body had wandered into the hallway, and Tony could see the exact moment that JARVIS took it over. Instead of hesitant, purposeless, exploratory movements, suddenly the thing walked easily, gracefully, and deliberately toward the doorway to the kitchen.

Inside the kitchen, Steve was the first to hear something—naturally, with his enhanced senses. “Hey, no need,” he said to Nat, “I can hear him coming now.”

Tony snickered as he watched the team, on screen, turn to look at the doorway to the kitchen. “Tony, you finally coming up?” Bruce called out. “We were about to have to go and get you.”

Then the JARVIS-controlled robot walked around the corner, and Tony nearly fell off his stool laughing at their reactions. Clint jumped out of his seat, knocking Bruce’s mug of tea over and sending it spilling across the table into the spot where Natasha’s lap had been seconds before. She jumped up herself to avoid the spill just in time. Steve, still standing at the stove, jerked with his entire body and nearly upended the pan of eggs, barely managing to catch it with one hand, but not succeeding in saving the pepper shaker, which fell onto the floor, lost its top, and rolled all the way to the table, leaving a five foot trail of pepper on the floor.

JARVIS chose that moment to relinquish control of the body, letting it go back to wandering almost blindly, reaching for random objects in the kitchen and looking between the various Avengers with no recognition or meaning. His sense of humor was truly wicked, Tony thought as his laughing finally calmed down.

Only to start up again when Clint cautiously approached the bot and poked it with an uncertain “Tony?”

It was made to be Tony’s size and shape, true, in order to fit into his suits and approximate his body in testing phases. But Tony couldn’t help but break down in hysterical laughter. “Oh my god—” he managed between fits of laughter, “do they—think—it’s me in there?”

There was clear amusement coloring JARVIS’s voice when he replied, “I believe it’s possible.”

“Oh man. They’re—they’re going to ask—” He couldn’t finish the sentence, but his prediction came true a moment later.

Bruce, ever the logical skeptic—also, there was a possibility he’d seen the testing body before when he’d been in the lab—shook his head as he watched Clint experimentally tap the thing. “JARVIS, where’s Tony right now?”

There was an uncharacteristic pause for JARVIS, as Tony, down in the lab, tried to catch his breath enough to answer. “Tell them, go ahead—but I’m not coming out.”

“He is currently in his private lab, Doctor Banner, and has asked not to be disturbed.”

Bruce nodded knowingly, Steve sighed, Nat rolled her eyes, and Clint made a disgusted noise. “Stark, you ass, I know you’re watching this. Just know, if you ever do get yourself stuck in some messed up metal robot suit, I’m ignoring it completely.”

Down in the lab, Tony snorted and returned to his work, ignoring the rest of his teammates upstairs as they started speculating on the robot body, occasionally aided by minimal information from JARVIS.

The rest of the morning passed fairly quietly. Whatever the reason, whether it was due to his distraction or not, none of the Avengers came down to bother Tony, and he made a lot of progress on his stabilizer. 

The testing body stumbled around the Tower all morning and half of the afternoon. His teammates had quickly concluded that it was some ridiculous experiment of Tony’s. They’d just as quickly figured out that it wasn’t very intelligent and couldn’t really interact with or react to them, so they mostly ignored it after the first half hour.

Mostly being the key word. Tony wasn’t privy to all of this, too busy with his work downstairs, but about every hour or so, JARVIS would activate another camera to show him some amusing footage of the few times he chose to take over the body. 

He did it rarely enough that the Avengers couldn’t predict it or figure out what was happening. Tony was sure Nat, at least, had her suspicions, but the rest of them continued giving Tony weeks’ worth of blackmail material and comedy gold whenever JARVIS briefly took over the thing.

Nat was still in the kitchen after everyone else left, bending down after a surreptitious glance around to switch out the pocket knife that Tony had grudgingly allowed her to strap to the underside of the table with a much larger, deadlier one that she knew very well the others wouldn’t approve of. She’d just let her guard down and bent to reach under the table when the testing body, which had seconds before been wandering aimlessly toward the other side of the kitchen, suddenly walked right into the other side of the table, bumping it heavily and sending Natasha scrambling back, knife raised in an automatic gesture.

JARVIS had clearly already relinquished control, because the body backed away from the table, contemplated it for a moment as though it couldn’t understand what it had collided with, then turned stiffly and wandered away again. Nat narrowed her eyes, clearly suspicious, but after watching it keenly for another minute and obviously not detecting anything unusual, she took her knife and left. Down in the lab, Tony chuckled and returned to his projects.

Similar patterns followed for the next few hours. Highlights included an arm strategically flung out just in time to prevent Steve from pressing the right elevator button to try to come down to the lab and bother Tony, “accidentally” sticking an arm into a lighting panel and electrifying the entire border of a room that Clint was trying to sneak into via the air ducts, and several good scares around corners and in doorways.

Tony muttered something about JARVIS being overprotective at one point when he watched the thwarting of various attempts to potentially bother or (in Clint’s case, mostly) prank Tony. He firmly retracted his statement, however, after JARVIS made the testing body’s head turn completely around, Exorcist-style, just as Clint was about to steal the last of Tony’s favorite coffee. Once his laughter had died down, he apologized to JARVIS and shut his mouth.

He did, eventually, tell JARVIS to take over and bring the thing back downstairs. It would probably be a good idea to take away its ability to independently move and learn before it took in enough information for Tony to consider it alive and start getting sentimental about shutting it down. He didn’t need to be personifying the dummy he used to make sure that ion blasts and explosions wouldn’t fry him in his suit.

As much fun as the morning was, and as much progress as he made on projects that really needed his attention, he found even by halfway through the afternoon that he still couldn’t stop thinking about the whole dream thing. He’d never really been one to remember his dreams well. He’d read somewhere, once, that writing dreams down as soon as you woke could help train you to remember them better, but he didn’t have the patience—or the regular sleep schedule—for that.

Sometime around three, he’d abandoned his other projects entirely and was researching some of the basics of neuroscience and dream studies, aided by JARVIS’s excellent data-combing skills. He was reading into EEGs and similar recording devices, thinking vaguely about creating one of his own, when the door to the lab opened behind him.

“Tony? I know you didn’t want to be bothered this morning, but I asked JARVIS about lunch and he said you hadn’t eaten a full meal all day.”

Tony turned from the projections of EEG strips around him with a smile. “Bruce, hey. Thanks for not coming down to drag me up. I was getting a lot of work done.”

Bruce scanned over the projections around Tony, forehead creasing slightly. “Everything okay?” Tony could see his gaze pause on some of the strips showing seizure activity.

He waved a hand reassuringly. “They’re not mine. Just doing some research.”

“Oh.” Bruce’s face cleared into a small smile. “Anything interesting?”

“Yeah,” Tony started, fully intending to tell Bruce about his ideas in detail, but then he paused. He felt… weird. Everything suddenly felt slow, odd, like he was in a fog. “Bruce? Is…” it was hard to think. “are you… what’s happening?”

There was no response from Bruce. There was a fog obscuring Tony’s vision, ringing in his ears, and he passed out.

Tony awoke in his bed with a start. He could swear that he was just down in the lab, talking to someone. Bruce? Yeah, it was Bruce. He’d been researching… something. Damn. The details were slipping out of his mind like they were nothing more than a distant dream.

He sat up in bed, looking around. The room looked exactly like it always did, nothing out of place that he could see. Everything was perfectly normal. It didn’t stop the lingering weird feeling.

He got out of bed, showered, shaved, dressed, and felt a little more human—then stopped in the middle of pulling his shirt on as that thought flitted across his mind, feeling all too familiar. The feeling of general weirdness just kept growing and he couldn’t shake it.

He gazed at his bed for a minute too long, apparently, because JARVIS spoke up. “Thinking of going back to bed, sir?”

Tony shivered at the words—they were way too familiar. He could swear that all of this had happened already, what felt like just a few hours ago. Was he going insane? Was this just some kind of weird dream thing? Maybe he slept too long. Or not long enough. Maybe it was the product of having spent nearly the entirety of the last three days awake. 

“No, just…” he trailed off, not even sure what he wanted to say to JARVIS. Eventually, he just settled on “weird dreams,” and left it at that, venturing out in search of breakfast.

When he approached the kitchen, he heard the rest of the team already gathered, talking. The smell of bacon and eggs was wafting out into the hallway, making Tony seriously consider for a moment whether he wanted something other than just coffee. Some real food might wake his brain up a little more and get rid of the lingering shuddery feeling of weird dreams and déjà vu.

When he got close, however, indistinct voices resolved into what sounded like a mild argument. Wondering if Clint and Nat were arm wrestling over who would get the extra pieces of bacon, Tony spoke up just before he made it around the corner. “Why can’t we all just get along?”

When he did come around the corner into the kitchen, however, it was to find the entire team frozen, staring at him with varying degrees of panic. Tony stopped dead in the doorway, looking around at all of them. “What? Is there something on my face?”

There was no response, and he looked between each of them, eyes narrowing. Steve visibly swallowed and turned back to the eggs he was cooking, but the other three continued staring at him, Nat and Bruce from the table, Clint from the counter where he was standing next to…

“Oh, you didn’t.” Tony’s voice had dropped lower, threatening, and Clint backed up with his hands held up in surrender as Tony approached the coffee machine. The empty coffee machine. With the container of Tony’s favorite coffee blend next to it… also empty.

“I didn’t think that was the last of it!” Clint said defensively, backing up a step from the dark look on Tony’s face. “You’ve been down in the lab for three days and no one’s seen you come up, I thought you had your own supply down there, I didn’t think you were getting it from up here…” he trailed off.

Tony turned to him, glaring, already plotting his revenge. An idea came to mind, though, and he purposely let his face relax into a friendly smile, giving an unconcerned shrug. “Don’t worry about it, buddy. I’m sure I can get my caffeine elsewhere.”

As expected, Clint looked far more worried by Tony’s suddenly jovial tone than his anger from moments before. “Um… you sure about that?”

Tony chuckled, stepping into Clint’s space and patting him on the arm. “Absolutely. Now, if you need me, I’ll be back down in the lab. Got some things I need to _finish up_.” He deliberately emphasized the last two words just so that he could laugh internally at the thoroughly unnerved look on Clint’s face.

He did, actually, have his own supply of coffee down in the lab, though it wasn’t his absolute favorite kind, which Clint had so thoughtlessly taken the last of. As Tony headed down, knowing JARVIS would already have it brewing by the time he got down to the lab, he contemplated whether he actually wanted to take revenge on Clint or just let him edge around nervously all day, wondering when his retribution would come. That might be an even better punishment.

When he got down to the lab, however, he glanced at the silent, motionless testing body he sometimes used for extreme suit tests and stopped dead yet again. That weird feeling was back again, and he could swear he had a clear picture in his mind of watching the thing move around independently. He could almost see it scaring the crap out of Clint as he tried to take the rest of Tony’s favorite coffee…

But that didn’t make any sense. The testing body was just a blank Tony-shaped body that Tony and JARVIS were capable of taking over remotely for brief periods. It didn’t have any independent intelligence or capabilities, and it never had.

“Something wrong, sir?” JARVIS’s voice came again, more concerned than in the morning. Obviously Tony’s multiple lapses weren’t going unnoticed.

“Don’t know,” Tony said. He could be honest with JARVIS. “I might have slept too long.”

JARVIS sounded long-suffering, and more like himself, when he replied with “For you, sir, I’m not sure that’s possible.”

Tony huffed and tried to wipe the weird feelings away. They had no place in the lab. By later in the afternoon, he’d succeeded, wrapped up in his projects. He was interrupted by Steve for lunch but got back into his groove quickly once he was done.

JARVIS was the one to interrupt him early in the evening. “Sir, you asked to be reminded before the event tonight.”

Tony looked up from his work, for a moment completely confused. He had no recollection of any event planned tonight. But then JARVIS brought up the invitation on the screen in front of him, and it was like a memory that had been momentarily blocked was released, filling in blanks in his mind that he hadn’t realized were there. 

“Right, of course. I’ll head up to get ready in a minute. Let’s start the cooldown on sector three and begin shutdown procedure for the fabricators. This is going to take all night, so I don’t plan on being back here until the morning if all goes well.”

Tony was upstairs shortly and changing into a nice tux for the event. He didn’t love schmoozing with shallow rich people to try to get their support for a cause, particularly now that he couldn’t just get drunk and end up sleeping with one of them like in the old days, but there were worse ways to spend an evening, and some of the kids benefitting from the charity might be there. Tony was always up for events that supported kids.

He met the rest of the team in plenty of time to get there, all of them looking dapper, at least as much as they could. Steve cleaned up well, as always, and Natasha looked radiant of course. Clint could look surprisingly good when he wasn’t allowed to pick out his own clothes, and Bruce looked as uncomfortable as ever in formal clothes, but like Tony, he was capable of sucking it up and pretending everything was fine for a good cause. He wished Thor was there, he always drew a crowd, but he’d gone back to Asgard for a while.

They departed in good cheer, piling into the limo with friendly conversation that continued until halfway through the drive, when their car was abruptly surrounded by four others, narrowly avoiding a collision. The Avengers inside were thrown sideways or onto the floor by the sudden braking, and before any of them could even ask what was going on, one of the windows was smashed and a smoking canister tossed inside.

Steve immediately tried to contain the gas, throwing himself over the top of it, but it was too late. The others were already choking on the fumes and before he could get to the door and try to get out, Tony was blacking out.

He woke with a gasp on a hard, cold floor, staring up at a stained ceiling. It took him a moment to remember what had happened—everything was strangely fuzzy, even before the car ride and the attack, like the entire day was some sort of strange dream. He couldn’t recall any specifics of the day, and the longer he tried to think about it, the blurrier the details got.

He turned his head when he heard a sound next to him and immediately groaned. He and his teammates, it appeared, were contained in just about the most clichéd cell imaginable, down to the steel bars separating their cell from the rest of the room and a covered rolling tray of what might very well be some kind of torture implements on the other side of the bars.

“Tony?” Tony looked around at the sound of his name. Steve was sitting up next to him, clearly having noticed that he was awake.

Tony pushed himself up, making a face at the taste of the sedative gas in his mouth. Nasty stuff. “How long were we out?”

Steve grimaced. “I woke up about twenty minutes ago, we were already in here. I don’t think we were out for long, but they took my watch and there’s no windows in here.”

“We can’t have gone far,” Clint said suddenly from behind Tony. Tony looked around to see him pushing himself up. “Air smells like home.”

Tony frowned, not sure what to make of that pronouncement. “Well, at least when we don’t show, everyone will know we’re gone. Not the smartest move, taking the whole team on the way to a gala like that.”

“Gala?” Steve said, frowning at Tony. The frown only became more severe when Tony gave him a questioning look. “I think the sedative might still have you a little confused. We were on our way to a press conference.”

“What?” That wasn’t right, Tony thought. He was sure there was a gala. Or… some kind of event. But not a press conference. He’d dressed in a tux, right? Getting money from rich people. It was for the kids. But when he looked down at himself, he was just wearing one of his serious gray suits, not the sleek black tux he’d been picturing. Was that some kind of messed up sedation dream he’d had?

Except he didn’t usually dream under sedation. He didn’t remember any dreams when he’d gone under and had the reactor removed.

Wait… something about that sentence wasn’t right. When did he have the reactor removed? It was still in his chest. But no… he remembered the surgery. Killian and the Mandarin. Pepper and Extremis. Modifying the virus so he could be put through the operation.

Something was very wrong. Tony groaned, grabbing at his head and leaning over. He could swear that they’d been on their way to a different event when they were attacked. It didn’t feel like a dream or a hallucination, it felt like a real memory. And before that, he remembered something else. Waking up in the morning feeling the same feeling, like he’d just lived most of a day and then woken up feeling like it was a dream. Or was that a dream too? What the hell was going on?

When he filtered the real world back in, someone had their hands on his shoulders, calling his name. “—ark. Tony, hey, man, can you hear me? What’s going on?”

That was Sam. Sam was crouched in front of him, looking concerned, dressed in a suit that Tony had bought for him. He remembered handing him the card and telling him he needed some proper “press-worthy” outfits, and the look on his face. Except Tony could swear that for a second there, everything felt really out of place, like he didn’t even know who Sam was. And he’d thought he still had the reactor in his chest for a minute. 

He had no idea what the hell was happening to him, but Sam was expecting an answer. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry. Think the gas gave me a hell of a headache.”

Sam let him go reluctantly, still throwing concerned looks his way, but he didn’t get a chance to challenge Tony’s assertion that he was fine, because the door on the other side of the room chose that moment to open. It squealed on rusty hinges—seriously, were they going for bad guy cliché bingo?—and three men in suits, wearing sunglasses indoors just to mark another box off on the bingo card, filed into the room.

“Mr. Stark,” the one in the middle said, utterly ignoring his teammates. Oh, great, so they were here for him. Another in a long list of Crappy Plans to Kidnap Tony Stark.

They had a heavy accent that Tony barely got a moment to try to place before Nat was speaking up. “What do you want with Tony?” She was mining for information and trying to distract at the same time, Tony knew, though he also thought there was a chance she was annoyed that they appeared to be dismissing all of the team members except Tony. Natasha wasn’t usually collateral in another person’s kidnapping.

“Mr. Stark is possessed of certain skills that we require. He has been reluctant to share those skills freely, so our superiors have decided that he requires some… persuasion.”

Tony groaned loudly, not bothering to tone down his reaction to the sentence. Sometimes it wasn’t a great idea to get on the bad guys’ nerves right away, and if the looks his teammates were giving him were any indication, they didn’t appreciate it either, but sometimes it threw them off well enough to give him an opening.

“Seriously? This is like a terrible horror movie. Did you follow the script word for word on ‘Failed Kidnapping Attempts of Tony Stark?’ I’m not doing shit for you, whoever you are.”

“They’re government,” Nat said, looking them over. Tony didn’t question how she knew, or that she was right, especially when the two in back exchanged a quick glance, clearly uncomfortable with her immediate spot-on deduction. She moved closer to the bars, obviously searching them up and down. “Somalia?”

“Kenya,” Tony said, real anger in his voice now. “Seriously? You’ve been haranguing me for months, and now, what, you finally got the hint that negotiating is getting you nowhere so it’s time to resort to coercion? Fuck off.”

The one in front gestured to the other two, who pulled out guns and approached the cage. “You’ve been most uncooperative, Mr. Stark, despite many chances from our employers. We would have paid you very well for your work.”

Tony laughed. “Right, because I don’t have enough money. If you didn’t notice, I stopped making weapons for governments. It was a bit of a big deal, you can’t have missed it. That includes programming weapons development software and cyberwarfare. So I repeat: fuck off.”

The leader smiled sardonically and gestured again to the two lackeys. One of them opened the door of the Avengers’ cage while the other pointed his gun at Natasha, who was closest to the door. When it swung open, he fired a shot at the floor inches from Nat’s feet. To her credit, she didn’t even flinch, but the others yelled in protest. Tony, however, kept his eyes on the main goon. He couldn’t help his instinctive flinch at the gunshot, but he could keep calm. He knew they were just trying to warn the other Avengers not to try anything.

“There’s no need for that,” Tony said, trying to keep his voice level. He wanted to find the sweet spot between looking calm and in control and appearing weak and terrified so they’d underestimate him. 

Head Goon smiled again. “Come with us, and there will be no need to hurt any of your friends.”

Tony heard a scoff from behind him, but he walked toward the door to the cage anyway. When he was right next to them, one of the armed men seized his arm and pressed his gun against Tony’s side, steering him out of the cage.

Once they were out of the cage and the goons had closed and locked the door behind him, keeping his teammates from trying to interfere and potentially get hurt, Tony felt it was safe enough to start running his mouth again. 

“Look, how are you expecting this to end? I’m not doing anything for you. We’re public figures, people have already noticed we’re missing. It isn’t going to be that hard to track us, and if any of you get caught in the middle of this, your government isn’t going to be happy when it’s publicized.”

The lead goon strode to the other side of the room, stopping next to the ridiculous covered tray full of more clichés. “Oh, I believe you will cooperate with us, Mr. Stark,” he said, smiling.

This was ridiculous. Tony was getting very sick of all of it, very fast. He wasn’t doing shit for these people and they should know that. Head Goon was trying to fit five different Bad Guy stereotypes at once, and the asshole who had hold of Tony was bruising his arm in his grip and jabbing Tony in the side with his gun. When said asshole gave Tony a nudge toward the other side of the room, twisting his arm as he did so, Tony lost what little patience remained.

“You know what? I’m not dealing with this. I have had a really fucking weird day, and not a great one, and I’m not dealing with this on top of it.”

With that, before any of the goons could interpret his meaning, he moved. The idiot pressing the gun into Tony’s side was making a rookie mistake, and all it took was a hard jab of Tony’s elbow backwards to push the gun arm away from his side.

Tony threw himself forward at the same time, using the goon’s grip on his arm against him. He was pulling back instinctively, trying to bring the gun back onto Tony, quite possibly to shoot him. Tony didn’t give him the chance, kicking a leg back into the man’s ankle at the same time as he tossed the rest of his weight forward, forcing the goon to bend at the waist and topple over.

Maybe there was some karmic justice, or just plain luck, left in the universe for Tony, because Asshole 1, the one holding Tony, fired as they both went down. His gun was still dislodged from Tony’s side, and so instead of wounding Tony, he hit Asshole 2, the one who’d fired at Nat, in the leg, who staggered to the side with a shout.

All of this had happened in less than three seconds, meaning that Asshole 2 had just barely brought his gun up and hadn’t had time to aim and fire at Tony in the scuffle. When he was hit in the leg, he toppled toward the cage containing the rest of the Avengers, where Nat, always quick on the uptake, had realized Tony’s intentions during his little outburst and moved up to the bars.

She reached between them now, grabbing Asshole 2 the moment he was close enough. With one hand, she grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head into the bars hard enough to seriously daze him. With the other, she grabbed his gun arm and aimed it at Head Asshole, so when his head slammed into the bars and his finger automatically tightened on the trigger, he shot directly at his boss, hitting him in the side.

By this time, Tony and Asshole 1 were headed to the floor, the latter still with a tight grip on Tony’s arm and a gun in his other hand. Tony tried, as he fell, to rip his arm out of the tight grip so that he could turn the forward momentum into a roll away from the danger of the gun, but he couldn’t quite shake it. Instead, he improvised in the split second that he realized he wouldn’t be able to pull away in time.

Asshole 1 was already bent at the waist, leaning over Tony’s back, so Tony kicked upwards with the leg he’d used to trip him, at the same time taking his weight over his back and tilting forward more, throwing the man over his shoulder. The man went over Tony’s shoulder into his own aborted roll. The grip remained on Tony’s arm and yanked painfully at his shoulder, but Tony let the momentum take him forward, too.

It surely looked completely ridiculous, two men held tightly together front to back and essentially doing a somersault together, but it achieved what Tony needed. When the half-roll was completed, they were both on their backs, Tony on top of the goon, and all it took was one more sharply thrown elbow—this time into the asshole’s face—to finally dislodge the goon’s grip on not only Tony’s arm, but his gun as well.

Which was thankful, because just as Tony leaned over to grab the gun and shoved himself up onto his feet again, another shot echoed in the room and Asshole 1 yelled in pain for a third time.

Natasha, at the bars, was occupied subduing Asshole 2. She’d managed to shoot Head Asshole in the side, but while she was busy with one goon and Tony was rolling on the floor with the other, he’d recovered enough to pull out his own gun and point it at the subject of his ire.

Tony had moved just in time, and brought Asshole 1’s gun up smoothly as he rose to his feet, planning to return fire on the man in charge. Head Asshole had the time advantage, however, with his gun already raised and pointing in Tony’s direction, so Tony was forced to throw himself forward and sideways into another roll just as he got his gun up in order to avoid the second and third shots from Head Asshole.

He came out of the roll right in front of the tray full of torture implements. The cover of the tray had come off when Head Asshole took the first bullet. Now, his gun followed Tony’s progress, and Tony had no time to think as he came out of the roll moments from getting a bullet to the head. He threw one arm up and grabbed the first thing his fingers touched off the tray, hurling it at Head Asshole.

It turned out to be a small, sharp pair of scissors. They hit Head Asshole point first, but not with enough force to do anything but distract him for half a second. That was all Tony needed, however, as he used that split second to shove the entire tray forward and then over.

Head Asshole went down with a shout as the tray hit him right in the wounded side, then tipped over on him as he collapsed. He was showered in sharp tools, and before they’d even stopped clattering to the floor, Tony had crawled forward, taken a scalpel from the wreckage, and stabbed it down three times, into Head Asshole’s arm, shoulder, and then chest. Head Asshole screamed and Tony didn’t need to try too hard to wrestle away his gun.

He pointed the gun down at Head Asshole, sneering, as he caught his breath. “You move, and I shoot.” He stayed on the ground in a crouch for a few seconds, letting the adrenaline of the moment fade, before he pushed himself to his feet, stifling the groan that wanted to escape at his various sore and bruised parts. He was too old to be rolling around on the floor and wrestling bad guys without his suit on.

Asshole 1 was still on the floor where Tony had left him. His nose looked to have been broken by Tony’s elbow to the face, based on the blood, and he was clutching a bullet wound to the shoulder from his boss. He was disarmed and Tony dismissed him as a threat.

Asshole 2 was slumped in front of the bars of the cell, unconscious. His gun was in Natasha’s hand, and to her credit, she had it steadily pointed at Head Asshole where he lay among the remains of the tray.

The rest of his team, however, were staring at Tony openly, clearly shocked. Tony resisted the urge to squirm under the scrutiny. “What?” he muttered as he moved back over to the door of the cell to look at it.

“Wow,” Sam said, “that was, uh, impressive. I didn’t… know you could fight like that.” He colored when Tony shot him a look. “You know, out of the suit.”

“I train,” Tony grumbled, disgruntled at their lack of faith in his physical skills. Not that it was entirely unwarranted, considering his squishy human status, his lack of spy or military training, his age, and his health problems, all of which left him somewhere below the rest of the team in terms of general fitness. Didn’t mean he had to acknowledge it to their faces, though. “I’m not useless out of the suit, you know.”

“Of course,” Sam said, sounding contrite. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound…” he trailed off, clearly not sure what to say.

Natasha, keeping her gun pointed at Head Asshole the whole time—though he was now disarmed and had rolled to his side, pressing one hand to the bullet wound and the other to one of the stab wounds Tony had created, freely bleeding and unlikely to be much of a threat any longer—bent down and pulled a key to the cell out of Asshole 2’s pocket, then tossed it to Tony.

The others came streaming out of the cell when he opened it. Clint and Sam went straight to the door, taking up positions on either side of it in case their activity had drawn attention and others were coming in. Nat kept hold of her gun and went to examine each of their captors to ensure they were unarmed. Steve, however, paused near the door of the cell, frowning at Tony.

“What did you mean, weird?” he said, and Tony stared, bewildered for a second.

“What?”

“Earlier, you said you were having a ‘really weird day.’ I mean, I know this happened, but you told me once you have at least ten kidnapping attempts a year. What did you mean, weird?”

“Oh, that. Um.” Tony cast around for something to say. In the adrenaline of the fight, he’d almost forgotten the weird feelings he had, the conviction that he’d been doing something else, with a different team, before he woke up here. He didn’t exactly want to share that with Steve and have him think Tony was even more of a basket case than usual. To stall for time, he said, “I believe what I actually said was that I was having a ‘really _fucking_ weird day.’”

Predictably, Steve grimaced at the language, but before Tony could even grin at his expression, he was hit with a wave of dizziness.

He nearly dropped his gun, putting his other hand up to his head. “Oh, no.”

“Tony?” That was Steve, sounding concerned, but his voice was far away, like it was coming from across the room. Tony’s vision was starting to go white around the edges.

“Not again,” was all he managed before he was out once more.

Tony woke once more with a gasp in his bed in the Tower. This time, before the echoes of dreamlike memories could even start to fade, he was throwing himself out of bed and heading straight down to the lab in his pajamas.

“Sir, are you feeling alright?” JARVIS asked, the same concern evident in his voice that had been in Steve’s just moments before.

Tony clenched his fists, trying to concentrate on his memories of the last few hours and not let them slip away. “Something’s up, J. I’m stuck in some weird ass kind of Groundhog Day time loop bullshit and I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t like it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

Tony ground his teeth. “Neither do I, and I don’t like it. This doesn’t make sense.”

An hour later, shoving his stool back and twirling in a circle with his hands in his hair, Tony let out a long sigh and repeated himself. “This doesn’t make sense. Tests are all normal. I’m not poisoned, I’m not drugged, I’m not hallucinating. I’ve eaten, I’ve slept, no weird readings around the Tower.”

“If I may, sir, tracing back details of the earlier memories may help.”

Tony put his face in his hands for a minute before composing himself and getting back to it. Concentrating so hard on what few bits of memories he could piece together was giving him a headache, but he had to get back to it. Whatever was happening, it couldn’t be good.

Another half hour passed, and Tony had left the realm of factual science, taken a trip through the murky waters of untested hypotheses and vague, unformed data, and entered the festering swamp of the open internet. He was reading a site on time loop tropes when he sat back again, sighing. “It doesn’t make sense! All the time loop stuff says I should be starting in the same place every time and ending when something goes wrong, but I’m not. I don’t die, there’s nothing clear that ends the loop, and I’m not even with the same people every time.”

“I hardly think popular film theories are the best things to base the rules of your problems on,” JARVIS said. His tone was the height of disapproving, but with that hint of gentle sass that Tony always loved to hear. “Perhaps if you’re planning to depend entirely on advice from less than reliable strangers, you’d like to pursue the horoscope sections of some popular magazines.”

Tony let out a disgusted sound. “Point taken. Internet sites about déjà vu and prophetic dreams aren’t exactly reliable sources. Not that there are any.”

“Is this what prompted last night’s creation, by any chance?” JARVIS said, and Tony’s head shot up from where he’d put it down on his arms in defeat.

“What?” Had he made something? He’d been on a three day engineering binge, that seemed to be a constant. When he thought about it, another vague recollection came to him, something to do with the suits? Or maybe… the silver testing body they used? He glanced over to the corner where the body stood, but it didn’t look any different.

“Your… ‘dream catcher,’ sir?”

“Dream… what?” Tony spun around, looking around the lab for anything out of place, and spotted it on a cluttered table a few yards away. It looked like a cross between a strange helmet and a VR headset, with wires trailing out of it and connecting to a power bank and chip for data collection and processing.

With a start, memories came flooding back. Conversations he felt like he’d had twice, about dreaming and wishing he could see his dreams. Something about JARVIS not being able to dream, and Tony talking about the subconscious with him, or was it with Bruce? All of the memories still seemed hazy and strange, like they were only half real.

“Is that—did I really make something to watch my own dreams?”

“That was the theory you presented, sir, though you were trying to come up with a better way to record data while sleeping. You said that the sensors in the first trial were uncomfortable to sleep on.”

Tony didn’t remember going to sleep with sensors on to collect data from his dreams. He didn’t remember building the thing, either. That wasn’t completely unusual when he was nearing the end of a few days straight in the lab, but with everything that was happening, he couldn’t trust it.

He looked at the thing with no small amount of trepidation. “JARVIS, did I… actually use it at all since making it?”

“You did, sir,” JARVIS replied immediately, and Tony tensed up, “for approximately two hours last night.”

Suddenly Tony’s mind was whirring. He’d used it. He’d, apparently, viewed his own dreams. Was that what he was remembering now? Were those weird flashes of dreamlike memories actually real memories _of_ dreams? That would explain why they had such an odd quality…

But it didn’t explain why he’d woken up in his bed this morning with no memory of having used the dream-viewer, or of taking it off and actually going to bed. He’d absolutely felt like he’d fallen unconscious in the middle of a conversation with—Steve? Damn, the details were already nearly gone—and woken up an instant later in his own bed.

Another possibility occurred to him, and that one scared him the most. What if he was using it right now? What if this was one of his dreams, and he was watching it, without realizing what was happening? After all, it made sense that a device to let someone view their dreams would put them in their own shoes when rewatching them. It would be near impossible to gather enough data about the physical body or space someone inhabited while dreaming to recreate it in the viewer so that they could watch the scene as though viewing a movie.

But if that was true… how did he get out of this? How did he stop it? And what if it kept happening, what if he went straight from one dream to another without waking up, but thought he really had woken up? From what little he remembered about each of the times he’d woken up recently, every one of them felt totally real in the moment. How was he supposed to tell?

He cast the thing another long, suspicious look and then shook himself out of his trance. “Okay. Let’s table it for now, J. I don’t think—it’s freaky. Messing with my head. I’m going to wait a while before any more testing.”

“That sounds reasonable,” JARVIS said, and Tony let out another long, steadying breath before turning back to the door of the lab and stopping short.

Steve was standing in the doorway, having come in without Tony noticing. He was giving Tony a slightly odd look, one Tony was too tired and confused to decipher, but then it cleared from his face and he gestured back at the door. “Breakfast is upstairs. I know you have plenty of food down here, but you promised you’d come up for a meal at least once every three days.”

For a moment, Tony was overwhelmed with such an instinctual sense of _wrong_ that he couldn’t make himself respond. It was astonishingly strong, and yet he couldn’t make any sense of it. There was nothing wrong about Steve that he could see, and if this wasn’t Steve, if it was an imposter or a hallucination or something, JARVIS would know and would say something. And Tony had agreed to the three day rule, it was true. Everything about the situation made sense.

Tony’s instincts could be very wrong, he knew that. He could panic over nothing, he could be manipulated into trusting the wrong people, he could be suspicious for no reason. Maybe that’s what was happening now. Maybe he was on edge because of all the weirdness and his mind was alerting to nothing. Or maybe, now that he thought this might all be a dream, he was suspicious of everything.

He shrugged and followed Steve out of the lab and upstairs, but the sense of wrongness didn’t go away entirely. He watched Steve carefully as they went up the elevator and down the corridors to the common kitchen, and while nothing was off that he could put a finger on, something still seemed strange.

That sense only increased when they got into the kitchen and he saw Nat and Clint sitting at the table in each other’s usual seats. It wasn’t like it was a big deal, and sometimes they did move seats for one reason or another, but on top of all the other oddness today, it was suspicious.

He tried not to stare as he ate, but that left his eyes to fall to either Bruce, who was quietly enjoying his breakfast and wouldn’t appreciate being stared at; Thor, who was exuberantly enjoying his and would try to engage Tony in conversation if he made eye contact; or Steve, who was giving Tony slightly concerned looks as he ate. Tony had resolved not to say anything about any of the weirdness going on; he didn’t need the team getting involved and potentially making things worse or even more difficult.

He couldn’t help himself when Steve took out a notepad and scribbled something down, however. “Aren’t you right-handed?” he blurted.

Steve looked up at him, and Nat and Clint stopped eating to stare, too. Thor stopped in the middle of whatever tale he was telling, and clearly Bruce was listening in as well. “No, I’ve always been left-handed,” Steve said slowly. “Are you feeling alright, Tony?”

He sounded way too concerned about it, Tony thought, considering that the others usually seemed to think Tony was incapable of remembering details about other people. It wasn’t true, but he let them keep the notion, partly because it was annoying to try to fight it and partly because it meant if he really did forget things, no one would notice or care.

But he was _sure_ Steve was right-handed. Tony had watched him draw a few times, and seen him write plenty. When he tried to think back on those instances, though, now he couldn’t quite remember. Maybe it was his left hand the whole time. Maybe Tony was just wrong.

Doubting himself now, Tony shook his head and tried to adopt an unaffected air as he finished off his breakfast. “Fine. It’s nothing, never mind.” Desperate to escape the oppressive staring, he shoveled the last bites of his eggs into his mouth and got up before he’d even finished chewing to rinse his plate, then fled from the room.

He didn’t go back down to that lab all day. He went back and forth in his head between berating himself for freaking out and overreacting, and wanting to exercise reasonable caution about what was happening.

He tried his best to sink into other work, spending most of the day engrossed in projects on one of his tablets. But little things kept popping up, each uncomfortably jarring, more than he felt they should be. Thor came by to ask him about something, and the pattern on his sweater was different than the one Tony had given him last week. Tony had to bite his lip to stop himself from asking if Thor had gotten another sweater—he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer. When he went back into the kitchen for a snack a few hours after breakfast, the spoons and forks were switched around in the drawer. Could have been some dumb prank, Tony told himself unconvincingly. 

By the time he finally convinced himself to go back down to the lab and take a closer look at the dream-viewer, Tony was thoroughly on edge and jumping at shadows. He shook his head at himself as he headed down. “I’m going insane, yeah, everything’s okay,” he muttered as the elevator doors opened into the lab.

When he approached the table where he’d left the device and saw that it was gone, his first, crazed thought was that it was never there in the first place. A second later, he shook himself. No doubt that thought was a product of his second-guessing himself and the weird shit that had been happening lately. Of course it had been there, it was real. But it was now gone.

“Great, just great. This is really what I needed,” he said out loud to no one as he spun in place, eyes searching the lab. He knew it wouldn’t be there—why would someone take it just to move it to a different place in the lab?—but he looked anyway. Might as well cover the basics.

By the time he’d searched the lab, concluded it wasn’t there, and gotten in the elevator to head back upstairs, he was starting to worry. What if it really wasn’t there because it was fake and this was all a dream? What if it was all real, but one of his teammates had taken it and tried it out and now they were stuck in some weird paranoia-fueled dream loop like Tony apparently was?

He supposed he should count himself lucky that he’d made it all the way to evening without another dizzy spell and passing out, followed by waking up in some weird new reality. Maybe if it didn’t happen again, that would mean this was really real and everything would be okay. But it was hard for Tony to believe that. He was also afraid to go to sleep, of what would happen if he did. He could probably manage another three or four nights with no sleep if he had an abundance of coffee and distractions, but no more than that. Would he successfully convince himself by then that this was real and he could resume life as usual?

Well, at least tonight he’d have plenty of distraction, looking for the device. He started on his own floor, wondering if there was a chance either he or one of the bots had moved it up there without realizing it, but it wasn’t there. He searched all of the other lab spaces with no luck as well.

Something was nagging at him the entire time, like there was something he was forgetting. He went back and searched a couple of the labs again when it became particularly acute, but turned up nothing. He didn’t know where the feeling was coming from or what the hell it was about. Just another thing to add to the list.

By the time morning came, he’d searched the entire common floor. He hadn’t found the dream device, but he had had several more jolts of uncomfortable unfamiliarity when he spotted something that seemed just slightly out of place or wrong. It made his stomach upset, and though he’d skipped dinner, when he went into the kitchen just before breakfast time, he found that nothing really sounded very good.

While Tony was still staring, vaguely nauseous, at the contents of the fridge, Steve walked in. Tony shut the fridge, resigning himself to not eating, and turned to see Steve scrutinizing him. “What?” he said, too tired to bother trying to ignore it or fake having slept.

“Are, uh, are you… feeling okay?” Steve asked, and Tony’s eyes narrowed at his hesitation. True, Steve didn’t always seem incredibly comfortable trying to talk about personal stuff, but when he did, he usually approached it with the same bull-headed stubbornness that he approached any problem with. He was rarely this reluctant.

Tony lied instinctively. “Fine, why?”

Steve didn’t say anything, but he did raise an eyebrow, a more characteristic disbelieving look appearing on his face. Tony sighed and tried for something more believable. “Tired. I didn’t sleep last night. But that happens all the time, what’s it to you?”

Again, there was that strange hesitation. “Any particular reason?”

Something clicked in Tony’s head. “Look, if this is about yesterday, forget it, I just forgot, what’s a little detail? It’s not like I care, anyway.” He didn’t think he managed the nonchalant tone as well as usual. By Steve’s expression, he definitely hadn’t.

“No, I mean, not entirely. I just, um…” Steve seemed to be steeling himself, which rarely preceded a good conversation with Tony. “You were in the lab for a few days, did you, ah—make anything new?”

The abrupt change in topic threw Tony for just a second, but then it all came together. He folded his arms and glared, and by the way Steve stiffened slightly, he knew he was caught out. “You want to come clean?” Tony asked.

Steve looked like a kid caught in wrongdoing for only a second, then his expression morphed into that righteous look that Tony had to smother the instinct to roll his eyes at. “You created something dangerous.”

Tony couldn’t help the sarcastic sneer, prickling up defensively. He was not in the mood to deal with this shit. “I make our weapons and gear. All of that’s dangerous, too. I don’t see you having a problem with that.”

“That’s different and you know it, Tony. Messing with people’s minds? That’s just… that’s wrong.”

That threw Tony off. “What?”

“I could see that it affected you, yesterday, you were acting off all day. And testing it on other people? I won’t allow it.”

Tony put his hands up. “Wait, wait. What the _hell_ are you talking about?”

Finally, Steve faltered, just a bit. “Your mind control device.”

“Mind control?” Tony was nonplussed. Hadn’t Steve been listening in to that conversation? A suspicion came to him. “How much of that did you hear?”

Steve looked more unsure than ever. “I—well, just the very end, but I heard you say it was messing with your head, and then—”

“—You made a dumbass assumption based on it, great.” Tony huffed. “You heard, what, fifteen seconds of me talking and decided I’d made something dangerous and you needed to confiscate it? What am I, five years old?”

“You act like it sometimes,” Steve muttered, ironically sounding like the childish and petulant one.

Tony couldn’t help the tiny smirk at that. Any chance to annoy Steve into acting like an ass. And while he was definitely a little peeved about having his tech stolen on a ridiculous assumption without even bothering to ask him, it was almost worth it to see Steve having to admit that he’d done something stupid.

“For your information, it’s not a mind control device. It’s supposed to let you view your dreams.”

Steve deflated. “Oh.” He looked thoroughly chagrined for a moment, which Tony very much enjoyed, but then his expression changed to mild interest. “Does it work?”

It was Tony’s turn to hesitate. He didn’t want to divulge any of the details of the last few days—hours, dreams, whatever the hell they were—but he couldn’t tell Steve he hadn’t used it, when Steve had clearly heard him say it had messed with him. “Not quite the way I want it to,” he decided on saying, “which is why I wanted to do some more testing in a while. On _myself_ ,” he added just to see Steve’s face redden again.

“Oh,” Steve repeated. Then, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have presumed—and it wasn’t fair to think, even if it was what I thought it was, that you’d try it out on other people. I have to apologize for that.”

Tony sighed again. Steve took all the fun out of his own humiliation, here, by apologizing so sincerely. “Next time you could maybe just, I don’t know, ask me. Let’s try that. Now where did you put it?”

“In my room,” Steve said, turning red again. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but I asked Nat and she said it was probably fine as long as no one touched it—”

“Wait, you told Nat? Did you involve the whole damn team in this?” Tony asked, only for his mouth to fall open when Steve cringed. “Seriously?”

“Not the whole team,” Steve said quietly, then after another embarrassed cringe, “Bruce doesn’t know.”

Tony smacked himself in the head with his hand. “But everyone else does? Great. Just great.”

He grumbled all the way up the three flights of stairs to Steve’s floor and through the halls to his room. He muttered under his breath and silently cursed the other Avengers. Clint, Nat, Steve, and Thor, all apparently blindly believing Tony would make some weird messed up mind control device and deciding, as one, that the best course of action would be to steal it from his lab and hide it.

He knew why they didn’t tell Bruce: because Bruce, having some functioning common sense in him, would want to tell Tony. At the very least, to ask him more about the device. There was also the possibility that Steve thought Bruce might join Tony in some sort of mad scientist adventure and insist on improving and using the thing, but most likely it was just that Bruce, unfortunately, was sometimes forced to be the dad to this team of idiots acting like teenagers.

When Steve threw open his closet doors, however, he stopped short. “Um.”

Tony peered around his shoulder at the empty floor of Steve’s expansive closet. He also couldn’t help but note with a mental snort that Steve’s closet looked like something out of a 40s movie, all black, white, and khaki colors, shirts neatly folded in perfect stacks and pants hung without a single crease on their hangers. Tony made a mental note to make sure some bright Hawaiian shirts found their way into Steve’s wardrobe “accidentally” in the near future.

“Where is it?” Tony asked impatiently. “Wrong closet?”

“It was here,” Steve said, sounding bewildered, “I put it right here on the floor yesterday afternoon.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “So, what, it got up and walked out on its own?” Seeing the look on Steve’s face at that, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, it can’t do that. That was sarcasm, in case you couldn’t figure it out. So you stole it from me, and what, someone stole it from you?”

“Natasha knew where I put it,” Steve said immediately. “She might have taken it, if she wanted to examine it herself, or had a better hiding place, or… something.”

“Great. Let’s go,” Tony said. Steve seemed to miss his complete lack of enthusiasm about this little adventure.

When they finally tracked Natasha down, however, and Steve explained the situation—while Tony smirked in the background—Nat said she didn’t have the thing.

“I took it, yeah. I figured Tony would find it missing and suspect you, since you told me he saw you listening in. I figured we should do a better job hiding it.”

“So where is it?” Tony and Steve said together.

She raised a manicured eyebrow, looking down at the knife she was sharpening, unconcerned. “I don’t know. I gave it to Clint to hide.”

Tony made a loud, long, irritated noise, partly to see Steve’s slightly irritated expression and partly just to vent his frustration.

Clint liked to find hidey-holes in the Tower, and he could be a pain in the ass to rival Tony just for the hell of it. They’d had many an epic prank war that raged over weeks across the Tower, and Tony had a bad feeling Clint might use this to mess with them.

He felt his prediction might have come true when they did finally find Clint in the range. At least Tony got to take some more slight satisfaction in Steve’s uncomfortable expression as he once again recounted his own presumptions and the truth Tony had told him. Clint smiled too wide when he agreed to take them to where he’d hid the thing.

They had to practically climb into one of the walls to get to the strange hiding spot Clint had managed to create behind the half-open panel beside a utility door. It was a significant struggle for Steve, with his bulk, to squeeze through the narrow space between the walls into the tiny, dusty half-room where Clint had created a strange sort of nest.

“Oops,” Clint said, doing a terrible job of disguising his smile, “I forgot, I originally put it here, but I moved it later.”

Tony rolled his eyes and Steve made a noise somewhere between exasperation and distress as he realized he’d forced himself through that tiny space for nothing. Steve was covered in dust when they got out, and Tony couldn’t help but join Clint in laughing at it.

He stopped laughing ten minutes later, however, when Clint led them to a second hiding spot that required climbing up a near-sheer wall in one of the auxiliary training gyms. Steve and Tony both managed it, but Tony was panting by the time they got to the top and he swore out loud when Clint laughed again and reported that he’d moved the thing from here, too.

“Clint, come on,” Steve said, at the same time Tony snarled, “For fuck’s sake.”

Clint laughed, but then sobered slightly at their expressions. “Okay, okay, sorry. Kill me for having a little fun.”

“Fun,” Tony repeated to himself in an angry mutter as they descended back down the wall, then followed Clint back to his floor and into his bathroom.

Tony balked when Clint climbed nimbly onto the counter and removed the cover from one of the ceiling vents. “If you expect us to go crawling around in there…”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Clint said, leaning forward to reach around the corner of the vent. “It’s not like Steve could fit, anyway.” He stopped for a moment, then leaned further in, sticking his whole arm into the vent and frowning. “Um…”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tony growled.

“Clint,” Steve said, his tone back to that stern one that usually made the rest of them listen without question. 

Clint pulled his arm out of the vent and held his hands up. “Hey, whoa, I’m serious this time, I don’t know what happened to it. This is definitely where I put it this morning.”

Tony leaned back, looking up at the ceiling for a full minute before he could gather the strength to look back at the others. Clint was looking sheepish and Steve determined. When Tony just stood there with his lips pressed together tightly, Steve spoke up. “So… Thor must have it. He’s the only other one who knows.”

“I’m going to murder you both in your sleep,” Tony said. Clint gave a nervous chuckle; Steve just ignored him and led the way out of Clint’s rooms and down to Thor’s floor.

Thor was on his floor when they knocked on his door, and opened it with his usual exuberance. “Friends! Have you come to retrieve Stark’s magical device?”

Steve looked shocked, while Tony crossed his arms again. “It’s not magic,” he grumbled.

“Science beyond your understanding, then,” Thor said, giving Tony a look that he wasn’t sure was condescending. Tony scowled.

“It’s not beyond my understanding, I made it.”

“The good Captain said you didn’t understand what it was you had created.”

“Yeah, well, the good Captain,” Tony gave Steve a sideways look, “is an idiot who shouldn’t assume things about my tech without asking me first.”

He stood by while Steve explained yet again how he’d been wrong. The humor of it was wearing off now, and Tony was getting really tired of tracking all of his teammates down through the Tower, looking for his dream viewer. He just wanted to get the damn thing back and figure out what the hell went so wrong with it that it caused him to be stuck in the weird dream loop that may or may not still be happening.

“My apologies as well, then,” Thor said with a grave look at Tony. “I am guilty of presumption in the matter as well. I took it from the Hawk’s rooms this morning to examine it myself. It gives off a strange sort of energy that I found… oddly familiar.”

Tony frowned at that one as Thor led them into his rooms. “Familiar? Like the arc reactor? Because I base a lot of my tech on that, and you know my dad made the original after studying the Tesseract and all that.”

“Not that sort of familiarity, no,” Thor said. “I recognize the feeling of the reactor. Mjolnir knows it well, too. But this seemed familiar in a different way. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”

Thor led them into the sitting room that adjoined his bedroom, but stopped in the middle of the room, frowning at the low table in the middle. “But it was here, just moments ago. I was studying it when you knocked on my doors.”

“You’re _kidding_ ,” Tony said. “What the hell?”

Thor moved forward and stuck a hand into the space over the table where, apparently, Tony’s device had disappeared from. He waved the hand around for a second, then abruptly withdrew it with a grunt. “Ah. Loki.”

“Loki?” Steve asked. 

Tony just groaned and threw himself down onto one of Thor’s couches, putting his head in his hands. “This can’t be happening.”

“Oh, but it is.”

They all jumped, Thor and Steve backwards, Tony to his feet, as the voice sounded from across the room. Loki was standing there in a shimmer of green, smirking at all of them. “Dear brother, were you messing with magics you didn’t understand again?” he said, addressing Thor.

Thor strode forward and crossed his arms, standing in front of Loki. “Return what you have taken.”

Loki gave an exaggerated pout. “Thor, how am I supposed to have any fun, stuck here on Earth with you, if I cannot at least send you on a merry chase to find your mysteriously missing items?”

Thor growled. “These games you play are acceptable when they stay between us. What you have taken today belongs to Stark, and you will return it.”

Loki’s eyes turned to Tony, glinting mischievously. “Ah, so it is something belonging to my _favorite_ human. Tell me, what miracle have you created this time?”

Tony, more than fed up with this entire thing, clenched his jaw. “That’s none of your business, Green Lantern.”

Loki quirked an eyebrow and walked over to stand in front of Tony, ignoring the way Steve puffed up defensively when he moved. He looked Tony over with undisguised interest that was nearly enough to make Tony squirm. “Ah, but it is my business, as it’s now in my possession, Stark. What would you give me to get it back, hm?”

“This is insane,” Tony commented. It was directed at the room in general, but again Loki answered.

“Not likely, for a mind as clever as yours, Stark.” He practically purred the words, and Tony rolled his eyes. Loki was mostly a villain, sometimes strangely helped them, and spent almost all of it inappropriately flirting with Tony. If Tony ever met Odin personally, he might have to smack him for deciding that being stuck on Earth was an appropriate punishment for him.

“It’s a figure of speech, Magic Fingers. If anyone in this room fits into the ‘not sane’ category, it’s definitely you.”

Loki just smiled wider. “Oh, you flatter me, Stark. You must think about me so often. Do you dream about me as well?”

Tony scowled and took a step back, making up his mind. “Okay, you know what? Screw this. This is way too ridiculous to be reality. This isn’t happening. I’m using the damn thing right now.”

He ignored the confused looks from the others and started pacing back and forth. “This has to be some sort of fucked up dream. How the hell do I wake up?”

Steve and Thor just exchanged bewildered, concerned looks at Tony’s outburst, but of course Loki capitalized on it. “Perhaps you’d like someone to kiss you awake,” he offered. “Isn’t that what happens in your fairy tales?”

“This isn’t a fairy tale,” Tony countered, but the last word started to slur. “Oh shit.” 

The dizziness was coming back. So he was right, and this must be another dream. It didn’t give him much comfort. 

“Perhaps it could be one,” Loki said, ignoring the way Tony staggered and fell onto the couch.

“In your dreams,” Tony managed, though the words were heavy with the numbness he felt on his tongue, spreading through his body.

“I thought you said this was your dream?” Loki’s voice said, the last thing Tony heard before he faded out.

Tony was up and out of bed in an instant once again. This had to stop. “JARVIS,” he said, “you know much about dreams?”

There was just the slightest surprised pause at his sudden awakening and question out of the blue. “I can compile some information on the scientific study of dreams, if you would like, sir. If you would like to discuss the content of your own, however, I’m afraid I may not be the best choice to share that with. I am lacking a subconscious and neither sleep nor dream, myself.”

Echoes of a similar conversation made themselves known in Tony’s head. He was already losing details of the last one, the weird crap with Loki, but he seemed to be retaining enough of the details to at least know the basics of what was happening each time. He supposed he should be grateful for that.

This time, however, JARVIS said something new. “You seemed quite distressed before you woke, sir, and scans show an unusual energy pattern in the room. Perhaps you might consider calling Dr. Strange, as I believe he claims to have expertise in these matters.”

Tony paused and blinked for a second, lost, then once again experienced that strange sensation of knowledge that he’d always had yet had temporarily forgotten clicking back into place. “Strange. Right. Yeah. That’s… a good idea, J.”

“Shall I call him?”

Tony glanced down at himself, still in his pajamas. “Uh, give me a few minutes to get presentable.” He probably also had a crazed look about him—weird dream loops would do that to a person—and he’d rather appear as sane as possible when trying to explain this to the condescending magician.

He ventured into the bathroom to clean up, and when he came out again, something occurred to him. Not all of these dreams seemed to be the same. “JARVIS, did I make something last night? A device to view my dreams?”

“You did indeed, sir, and I collected data overnight regarding your dreams. You said you planned to test it in the morning, though I once again would like to suggest more thorough simulation testing before you try it on yourself.”

Tony could tell from his tone alone that JARVIS didn’t expect him to actually follow that advice, and so he didn’t even bother acknowledging it. Instead, he left his room and took the elevator down to the lab, stopping in the common kitchen for coffee on the way down and to tell his teammates gruffly to leave him the hell alone, he was working. He might not have needed to be so rude, but now they’d seen him and they might actually listen to him. They knew very well that interrupting a pissed off Tony in the middle of his work didn’t have good results, and he wanted them staying the hell out of this dream business.

When he got down to the lab, he found and examined the dream device. It looked like it had the last time, Tony thought, as far as he remembered the last time. The only time he’d seen it in that one was hours and hours before, and the details were getting very fuzzy. It looked like a strange helmet with trailing wires. He set it up next to one of his scanners and they started feeding information back and forth to each other while JARVIS called Strange.

“What is it?” Strange said the moment he appeared on the video screen. “You know, I do have a job to do, Stark, I’m not just here to indulge you every time you want to whine about how magic isn’t real.”

Tony didn’t rise to the annoyed tone, instead sitting grim and somber on his stool. “This isn’t about that. I need your help.”

Strange gave him a look. “Don’t tell me you messed with something magical.”

“Not as far as I know,” Tony said. “What do you know about dreams?”

Strange raised his eyebrows. “Would you like to specify? That’s a pretty broad category.”

Tony took a breath and then gestured behind him. “Okay, so I made this last night. Apparently had the idea to try to record data while sleeping and turn it into a format that would allow me to rewatch my own dreams.”

Strange frowned. “You realize that’s likely not possible, right? Our minds process more during dreams than they do awake, and we don’t use our senses for input in a dream the same way we do awake. Dreams are often lacking a lot of details that make up the environment and even the subjects in them. Our minds fill it in automatically or just ignore the gaps; it would make it very difficult to put them into a format where we could watch them while awake.”

Tony grimaced. “Yeah, well, maybe there’s another way. More immersive. Or… something.”

“Such as?”

“Making yourself the subject. Not viewing them like you’re an outsider, but essentially having them again. But the data feed required might put the subject into a dreamlike state themselves, so maybe they would essentially just be dreaming again, and not remember it all when they woke up.”

“Interesting idea,” Strange sighed, “but like I said, I’m busy. If you called me just to talk theory, I’m afraid you’ll have to call again at a better time.”

“No!” Tony said, louder than he meant to. “This isn’t theory. At least, I don’t think. I made it work. Maybe. But it’s working too well, or maybe not well enough. Fuck, I can’t figure it out.”

He got another frown. “You’re not making a lot of sense, Stark.”

Tony rubbed a hand over his face and through his hair. “Right. Shit.” He cast around for how to start explaining this. “Okay, so I woke up this morning, in my bed, right? Except that was days ago. I’ve woken up this morning at least four times now. I keep reliving the same day.”

Strange looked properly interested now. “That sounds like a time loop to me.”

Tony shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like it. In some of them, I’ve made this thing,” he gestured again behind him, “and they all feel… weird. Like dreams. I don’t remember them for long when I wake up, just bits and pieces, and feelings. And they’re different. Different people, even… I think. I had this feeling once, like the team was totally different in one of them. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Did you know the different people in that one?”

Tony pressed his palms into his eyes, trying to bring up his hazy memories of the previous days. “Yeah, but it was weird. It’s like… every time something is new, or different, it seems wrong for only a second and then it just clicks, like it was right all along. I just sort of accept it.”

Strange tilted his head. “That does sound like a dream state. Our conscious defenses against the abnormal are lowered and our brains process so fast that new information is integrated in an instant, as though it was there the whole time.”

Tony nodded. “This thing was there in at least one of them, and I think I might have used it. I’m starting to think that maybe I’m using it now. The problem is, how do I tell? Every time I wake up, it seems real. Whatever is happening makes sense and seems real to me. I keep thinking I’ve woken up, but then I wake up again.”

He hoped Strange couldn’t hear the plea in his voice. It was a bit pathetic, but this whole situation was disconcerting and he was really tired of it. He didn’t want to question his reality. He just wanted to wake up at home.

Strange frowned again. “I feel obligated to point out that creating something like this was already a foolish endeavor, but to test it on yourself…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony waved a hand, annoyed, “save the lecture, please. Trust me, I’ve learned my lesson. Or I will, whenever I actually wake up. For all I know, this is a dream too and everything you’re telling me is my own brain coming up with ideas.”

Strange let out a quiet, disbelieving noise at that. “Well, have you tried putting it on again?”

Tony glanced back at the device. “No. Pretty sure I avoided it before, everything was so weird.”

“Perhaps you should try it. If you really are dreaming now, then maybe putting it on inside the dream will wake you up. And if you’re not, then maybe using it will make it more obvious what’s a dream and what’s not.”

Tony eyed the thing with trepidation, but Strange didn’t offer any words of comfort or encouragement. “Call me and let me know how it goes,” he said, then ended the video chat without waiting for a response.

“Ass,” Tony muttered. Strange could be insufferable at times, but he really was helpful. As much as Tony didn’t want to put the thing on and potentially cause even more weirdness, he didn’t really see another option. In the last one, he recalled, he avoided it and then something went wrong. He couldn’t remember what, but he definitely didn’t get a chance to put it on again. Something had happened to it, and—was Loki there?

Everything was wacky as hell already. What the hell, Tony decided. “JARVIS, boot it up. Integrate last night’s data and let’s go.”

“As you wish, sir,” JARVIS said, long-suffering as always. “Would you like me to inform any of your teammates that you’re about to do something potentially hazardous, or would you prefer there to be no one around should something happen to you?”

Tony smiled at the sarcasm. “Never let them see you bleed, J,” he said, and JARVIS didn’t dignify that with a response. “Besides, you’re here, you’ll keep an eye on me. That’s all I need.”

He jammed the helmet onto his head and closed his eyes, hearing the whirring of the device starting up. It was loud enough inside the helmet—combined with his pulse thundering in his ears—that he didn’t hear JARVIS’s reply.

His first thought on waking up was _finally_. It wasn’t his bed in the Tower. It was a bed somewhere else, somewhere that seemed comfortable and familiar. And, he realized with a jolt when he heard soft breathing next to him, there was someone else in the bed with him.

He turned quickly, seeing the smaller form beneath the covers in the dark. Oh. “Pepper,” he couldn’t help but whisper, but thankfully, she didn’t stir. He sat up in bed and looked around, recognizing the room after just a few seconds.

The house in Malibu. Right. That’s why Pepper was here, sleeping next to him. They’d lived together in the house in Malibu for a while. Except… that was a long time ago, right? Back when he still had the reactor. The Malibu house was gone now, rubble at the bottom of the ocean.

Instinctively, his hand jumped to his chest, rubbing over it, but there was no reactor. None of that constant, aching pain. No glow in the darkness of the room.

Which meant… this was a dream. It must be. He was viewing his dreams, the device he’d made was working right, because he’d never been in the Malibu house without the reactor in his chest. 

Okay, so there was something to Strange’s advice. He seemed to be able to remember his last awakening perfectly well, the conversation with Strange, and putting the device on to view his dreams. And it seemed like he was definitely doing that, now. Which must mean the whole situation with Strange was real.

Except that didn’t seem right. There was something wrong with that scenario that he couldn’t figure out. His head still felt fuzzy and unclear, and something was wrong with the entire thing.

And now that he was fairly sure he was using the device and actively rewatching dreams… how did he get out? Not that this was a bad one, it seemed peaceful enough, but how did he end it?

The thought had barely fully formed before his surroundings were dissolving. There was a strange feeling in his stomach, like he was freefalling, and then it ended and he was sitting behind a desk in a room he didn’t recognize.

After looking around for a minute, however, he did recognize it. His office at the Compound. Right—the moment he realized it, he had that feeling again, of knowledge slotting into place. What was it Strange said, the mind processing faster that it realizes? Something along those lines. Great, so that was still happening.

He got up to explore this one a little. He was dreaming, so maybe he could change things. He stared at the chair behind the desk, willing it to change into a different chair that he used to keep in the Stark Tower office, but nothing happened. He supposed, even if it were possible to do that inside an active dream, this was viewing previous ones he’d had. He couldn’t change things.

It seemed like he should have some memory of this. He occasionally remembered his dreams, at least bits and pieces of them, and JARVIS said he’d gathered this data from the night before he put the device on. Shouldn’t he at least remember something about these dreams, being in the Malibu house with Pepper or here in the Compound?

Maybe he’d remember more if he went exploring a bit. He left the office and started wandering the halls of the Compound, but he never ran into anyone else. It wasn’t completely impossible; in the days shortly after the “Civil War,” before he’d hired more staff to turn the place into a proper facility but after half of his team had abandoned him, it had been pretty damn empty here.

It was strange, trying to figure out the rules and the theory behind this. He thought as he walked, but the more he tried to reason out, the more questions he had. If he was just reliving his dreams, why did he seem to have full control over his own body? Shouldn’t he be forced to do whatever he had done the first time in his dreams? Or was the device not working quite as intended; had the data collection only created the environment of his dreams, without the subjects, so that he could explore the worlds he’d dreamed in but not interact with any of the participants? But if that were the case, what about Pepper in the last one?

And there was still something… wrong, something nagging at him, that was really bothering him. He couldn’t figure out what the hell it was, and the harder he tried to grasp it, the further away it seemed to get. There was something seriously wrong with all of this.

Maybe it would come to him if he stopped trying so hard to think about it and just let it happen. Just letting things happen wasn’t exactly one of Tony’s strong suits, but then, at least this was just viewing old dreams through a device. What harm could it do?

No sooner had he had the thought than he was fading yet again into a new dream. Interesting, how it worked. Perhaps it wasn’t as active as he’d thought. Maybe the dream fading into another right when he’d thought about it the first time was just a coincidence.

He was standing this time, in a completely unfamiliar place. He looked around, astonished, at white and blue walls making up a blindingly bright room. It was clean and ultra-modern, and totally strange. The more he looked, however, the more the surroundings seemed to resolve into something vaguely familiar.

A lot of the blue was actually screens, holographic projections like Tony used in his own lab. They were displaying schematics and data for things he’d never seen and didn’t understand, but the setup looked oddly familiar. A lot like his own lab, actually.

Which made sense. If this was a dream, maybe he’d created some weird futuristic space in his brain, but he still set it up like something he knew well. He had no idea where he’d come up with the idea, though. It was all so… alien.

Alien was the right word, he realized with shock, as the door opened across from him and admitted an actual alien. Another thing his brain produced from who knew where, but it was cool, that he could admit. The alien was mostly humanoid, although they stood about a foot shorter than Tony, had two sets of eyes, and only four fingers each on the ends of arms that nearly reached the floor. 

“King Anthony?” the alien said, stopping to give him a strange sort of bow. “The Queen is requesting your presence.”

Tony gaped for long enough that the alien took a step forward, giving him a quizzical look. “Are you alright, Anthony?”

Tony shook himself, realizing he needed to come up with an answer. “Yes, I’m fine. Sorry. Tell the—uh—the Queen I’ll be there in a minute.”

The alien gave another bow and left the room, though not before giving Tony one more scrutinizing look. Tony blew out a breath when the door closed behind them. “Weird ass dream,” he muttered to himself. Partly to remind himself that this _was_ a dream.

It was only when he started walking across the room, trying to get a closer look at the schematics displayed on one of the screens, that he realized he was wearing something made of an unusually soft, smooth fabric. He looked down at himself and his eyebrows rose. He was wearing an outfit that didn’t seem at all like him, all silvers and greens, like a strange, futuristic uniform. Well, for a weird dream like this, he supposed it made sense.

Just as he was wondering what was going on with this place where he was apparently a King, and whether the Queen was going to be Pepper, things started getting blurry and fading out again. Damn, this one was interesting. He’d have liked to hang around and explore.

When his surroundings resolved once more, he was in a building that seemed vaguely familiar. There was a feeling swooping in his gut, like anxiety that didn’t quite have a place. He suddenly felt like there was something he needed to do, somewhere he needed to be. 

As soon as he placed the feeling, he recognized the building. Ah, an old favorite. He was back at MIT. Probably missing an exam, which was funny, because he’d never had any anxiety about that when he actually was a young teenager in college. He’d been mostly a model student, if you didn’t count occasionally nearly setting his entire dorm on fire with his experiments. He’d learned to drink in college, but he’d actually avoided it before any serious exams. He wanted his damn degrees and nothing was going to endanger that.

He didn’t have a lot of the good old ‘late for an exam’ dreams anymore, but they did occasionally happen. He laughed at this one and went looking for professors and friends he recognized. He noticed as he walked that a lot of the people surrounding him were slightly blurry, faces and features unclear. He wondered if that was because his brain hadn’t bothered processing real faces for them the first time around. 

He was a little disappointed when this one faded out; he’d wanted to go looking for a young Rhodey. But as soon as things faded back in, he was completely distracted from thoughts of Rhodey and MIT.

He felt different. Strange. He was standing in a room that looked like one of the ones in the Tower, but changed. Everything looked different, like there was a slight blue sheen over the entire world, and when he looked down at himself, he gasped out loud. 

His skin was covered in glowing blue lines, scrawled over every inch of him. He nearly fell over with the shock, just barely managing to stumble to the bathroom, and just about collapsed when he looked at himself in the mirror.

He looked like himself, but not. Those lines were all over his face, too, glowing bright like strange magical tattoos. In contrast, the natural lines in his skin, markers of age and stress, were gone. His eyes looked even freakier, not his usual brown but a vivid, electric blue, shining with their own light like the glow that used to come from the arc reactor.

Which reminded him—he looked down, but the reactor wasn’t in his chest. Instead, it seemed, it was all over his whole body. He had no idea if this weird glow had anything to do with the reactor, but… Christ, this was fucked up. 

He wandered out of the bathroom, wondering… if this was the Tower, where was everyone else? “JARVIS?” he called out, but no one answered. Okay, no JARVIS. He moved out of the living room he was in and into the nearest kitchen, then through most of the rest of the floor, looking for someone, anyone. He came up empty.

He was thinking about searching other floors when he walked by one of the large windows in an outer hallway and stopped dead.

It was New York City outside the Tower, for sure, but it was so starkly changed that Tony almost didn’t recognize it for a moment. Entire buildings were gone, skyscrapers that used to define the silhouette of the city wiped from existence. Others that he could see were half destroyed, chunks missing from them like the city had been bombed.

What the hell had happened here? Was this some sort of freaky post-apocalypse dream? Was this the alien invasion Tony had nightmares about? It looked like a more drastic version of what happened in New York the first time, for sure, but it didn’t explain Tony’s appearance. What the hell was wrong with him?

“Tony? You here?” That was Rhodey’s voice ringing out, and Tony turned, practically running down the hallway toward it. This might just be a dream, but it felt incredibly real and it was freaking him out. He would love to see a familiar, friendly face right now.

But he came to a halt in the doorway, nearly tripping over his own feet, when he got to the sitting room where Rhodey was emerging from the elevator, looking around for him. Rhodey was in a wheelchair. In a wheelchair, his too-thin legs not moving, rolling along with the sort of casual ease that told Tony he’d been in it for a while.

“Hey, what happened? You okay?” Rhodey said, immediately concerned by the look on Tony’s face. Before Tony could respond, everything went fuzzy again.

Thank god, was all Tony could think. Whatever was going on in that last one, it was clearly a nightmare. He didn’t want to spend a minute longer than necessary there.

This time, everything resolved into a house he truly didn’t know. One he’d never been in before, but it looked cozy and lived in. Looking around with interest, he spotted some of his own things strewn around the place, and there was a scent in the air that he swore he recognized. Pepper?

Maybe this was another fantasy. He was okay with that, especially after the last nightmare. That one still seemed to be clinging to him. He peered out the nearest window and saw a lovely, peaceful view of what looked like a lake and a forest. Nice place. Not the type of fantasy he’d have thought he would have, but then again, maybe a peaceful life was what he’d always craved deep inside.

“Daddy?” said a tiny voice, and Tony just about shit his pants when he turned around. There was a little girl standing in the doorway to the main room he stood in, no more than five years old. In this house in the middle of nowhere, calling Tony “daddy.”

“Hey,” he managed through his panic, bending down so he was at eye level with her. He clearly didn’t think that plan through, though, because she moved forward and put her arms up, clearly expectant. He couldn’t do anything but pick her up.

“You came home from the store early,” she said into his ear, nearly whispering. “Mommy said you’d be gone for hours.” She giggled, and the sound melted Tony’s thumping heart.

He moved over to the couch and sat with her in his lap, really just so that his legs wouldn’t go out from underneath him. She felt insanely real, even though this was a dream. Her tiny weight in his arms, her voice in his ear. Shit.

Trying not to let his panic show in his voice, he whispered back, “Didn’t like anything at the store. None of it was good. Where’s mommy?”

She cupped her hands around her mouth and leaned forward, and Tony had no choice but to lean in as well. “She fell asleep,” she whispered, then giggled again, “she said she would stay up until you got home but she fell asleep.”

Tony smiled. “Well, mommy works hard and she’s very tired. We should let her sleep, right?”

The girl smiled and leaned back, and Tony made the mistake of looking directly into her face. Oh fuck, she had his dark hair and his brown eyes, and he could see Pepper’s soft features in her face. He’d never imagined anything like this in his life. She sat in his lap, heart beating, lungs breathing, as solid as anything, and this was way too real. He couldn’t stop the spreading numbness, anxiety creeping up on him. This was too real.

“Are you okay?” she whispered, leaning one more time into him, but he couldn’t answer. Everything faded out.

When the world faded back in, it was black, and at first, Tony didn’t know what was happening. He was standing, and the cold tendrils of a panic attack had him in their grip, and everything around him was black. Was it because his vision was going?

No, he realized, it was the helmet. The dream-viewing had ended. Thank god. He practically ripped the helmet from his head, taking a few shaky steps and sinking down onto the ratty couch behind one of his desks. JARVIS’s concerned voice was ringing in his ears, but he couldn’t make out the words as the panic took over and he started hyperventilating.

Shit. Fuck. Way too real. He couldn’t handle how real it had all felt. All the weirdness of waking up repeatedly in the Tower, followed by that… he couldn’t do it. But he was panicking now and he knew how to deal with this. He’d done it before. It took a monumental effort, but he managed to start counting in his head as he breathed, trying to force his exhales to last longer. One, two… okay, no, too fast. Try again, one, two three… better. Try again…

It took another few minutes, but he managed to fight it down, the whiteness at the edges of his vision receding and his head clearing as he stopped breathing so fast. His heart rate slowed, and he bent over in the aftermath, putting his head on his knees. He was shaking as the anxiety receded, it always happened that way.

“How long was I using it, J?” His voice still shook, but it strengthened with every word.

“Approximately seventy-four minutes, sir.”

Shit. Over an hour. He wasn’t sure if it had felt like more or less than that. He sat up and his mind went into overdrive.

This didn’t answer anything. When he wore the device just now, he remembered everything he saw. He didn’t pass out in between dreams, the world just went fuzzy around him. It was clear that they were dreams, but it was nothing like what had been happening in the real world. Or what he thought was the real world.

Tony jumped up from the couch and began pacing. “J, call Strange back. If he tries to resist, tell him it’s urgent and if he doesn’t answer I’m going to head over there and make every device he owns play nothing but AC/DC for the rest of the year.”

JARVIS didn’t respond to that, but a few moments later a video screen popped up in front of Tony. “What?” Strange snapped, but before he could rant at Tony, Tony was already talking.

“It didn’t work. I mean, it worked, but it didn’t help. I wore the thing, I watched some dreams, but they weren’t anything like what’s been happening, what I told you about before. This is two different things going on, here. And the dreams… they were weird. Way too real. It didn’t make sense for something that was just reconstructing collected data from dreams.”

Strange’s irritated expression had been replaced by undisguised curiosity as Tony spoke. He didn’t appear to have any concern or sympathy for Tony’s agitated state, but Tony didn’t exactly expect that from him.

A golden portal sprung to life in the middle of Tony’s lab a second later, and Tony barely stopped himself from jumping. He did glare at Strange as he walked in, brushing off his stupid sentient cloak and looking around importantly. “You could give me some warning. Or, here’s a novel idea: _ask_ before you break into my lab.”

Strange just moved over to the desk where Tony had thrown down the dream device. “I was under the impression you asked for my help, Stark.”

Tony grumbled, but followed him over to the desk. Strange stood in front of the desk, pushing the rolling stool aside, and held up the device. He examined it from various angles, then put it down and hovered his hands over it for a minute, his cloak fluttering behind him.

“There’s a strange energy here,” he eventually said, frowning down at it. “It feels… almost familiar, yet not quite. I can’t place it.”

“Story of today,” Tony muttered.

Strange continued his examination for a minute, then abruptly turned to Tony. “Tell me what happened when you put it on.”

Tony hesitated for only a second. He didn’t exactly want to divulge all the details, but he really needed some help with this. He had no idea what was going on and he felt like he was losing his mind. 

So he took a breath and started from the beginning, telling Strange everything he could remember about the dreams he’d viewed. It started with Pepper in the Malibu house, then the Compound office… but as he said it, he got that feeling again, the one like something was wrong. He couldn’t figure out what it was, but Strange was looking at him expectantly, so he kept going.

After the Compound was the one with the alien. Strange stopped him there, asking about the details of the room around him, what he saw, what he felt, what was on the screens. When Tony had shared everything he could remember, he moved on. After the alien was… MIT. Strange didn’t ask any questions about that one, just let Tony talk.

After MIT was the nightmare, and Tony hesitated in retelling that one. Strange asked more questions than ever, about Tony’s eyes, the strange lines on his skin, and how he’d felt different. Tony couldn’t tell him much—he didn’t understand the different feeling himself—but Strange pressed him for detail after detail, until Tony started to clearly get frustrated.

Finally, he moved on to the one with the little girl, and it was here that his hands started shaking again. He described everything he could about the house, and then the girl herself, and he had to stop several times to take deep breaths. “It was so real. It didn’t feel like a dream at all. I felt like I _knew_ her, like she was _mine_.”

Strange was watching him with a strange expression, and he stepped closer in response to Tony’s distressed words. He raised his hands and Tony flinched back, but Strange just brought them up to hover in front of Tony’s head. “Think about her. Talk out loud if it’ll help, but think about her again, what she looked like, what you felt about her.”

Tony tried to concentrate, but it was hard with Strange’s hands right there, Tony wondering what the hell he was doing, so Tony started talking again. He repeated everything he could remember of their conversation, and he described the little girl again.

When he was done, Strange pulled his hands back, stepping back with a thoughtful hum. “So?” Tony asked anxiously. “Find anything?” He didn’t get what Strange was doing, some kind of weird magic mumbo jumbo around his head, but if it brought some answers, he might not argue about magic for once.

“I’m not quite sure,” Strange said, and he sounded annoyed about that. “I have some theories, but nothing more than that.”

“Well, I’m all ears. I think I’m out of ideas, myself,” Tony said. That wasn’t true, he was bursting with ideas and thoughts, but none of them were anything he could prove, and his head still felt floaty and unclear. He welcomed anything substantial or new from Strange.

“There’s some magic to this device you created. Something that defies known laws, that’s leaving a trace of something that comes from… somewhere else.”

Tony made a disgusted face. “I don’t dabble in your magic crap.”

“Perhaps not,” Strange said primly, “but you’re certainly capable of screwing something up and accidentally messing with something you’re completely ignorant of.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Tony said, but then he scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed again. He didn’t need to be antagonizing the one person who might be able to help him here. “Let’s say I did accidentally do something. What did I do? And can I reverse it?”

Strange shook his head. “I don’t know quite what it is.”

“Why don’t you take a guess.”

Strange hesitated. “Some part of what I felt seemed like it came from another plane of existence. It could be a magical one, but it could also be a physical one.”

“Are we talking, what, other universes?” Tony asked. “Parallel dimensions or something?”

“That’s one possibility,” Strange nodded. “I’m not saying it’s absolute, but there’s a slight possibility that you accidentally created something that doesn’t just recreate data from dreams, but uses them to pinpoint the places in this dimension that cross over with others, and stretches across that line. What you saw when you were wearing it… it’s possible that you actually visited those other dimensions.”

Tony snorted, highly skeptical of that idea. “That sounds like a hell of a lot of guesswork to me. Also not very likely.”

“I didn’t say it was likely, but it is possible. Whatever it is, there’s a trace of something very strange around that device, and I’d like to know more about it.”

“So, what, you want to take it home, study it?”

Strange gave Tony a look that had his stomach sinking. “No. The trace I’m feeling originated from you wearing the thing. We should repeat those circumstances, so that I can get a better understanding of what’s going on.”

Tony couldn’t keep the fear off his face as he looked at the device. “You want me to put it back on? Seriously? I’m going crazy here.”

Strange’s eyebrows rose. “You said you could distinguish the dreams when you wore it. And don’t you want to know what’s happening?”

Tony growled and crossed his arms, resisting the urge to run them nervously across his chest or through his hair. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Fine. Now?” He half hoped the answer was yes, half hoped it was no. He’d rather get it over with, but he dreaded putting the thing back on.

“Yes, the sooner the better, before the trace of what was there before is gone completely.”

“Fine. Great. Let’s get to it.” Tony knew his reluctance and tension were obvious in his voice, but Strange didn’t comment, just silently handed him the device. He slipped it back on his head with great apprehension, closing his eyes and fighting to keep his hands from shaking.

Strange’s voice was muffled through the helmet. “Just concentrate and act however you were acting before. I’m going to do some sensing while you wear it and see if I can find anything.”

Once again, Tony didn’t get the chance to respond before the world was fading out around him.

Tony woke more slowly this time, comfortable in a bed. It wasn’t the bed in the Tower, or the one in the Malibu house. It was familiar, though. The Compound. That’s where he was.

He sat bolt upright a second later as all of the memories came back. The dream device. Strange, and being in the Tower with his team. “JARVIS?” he asked out loud.

There was a pause, and then, “Sorry, Boss, it’s me here.” The voice was hesitant and tinged with melancholy, the way she always was when Tony woke up asking for JARVIS.

“FRIDAY. Sorry, my girl, I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t mean to—weird dreams.”

He sat up in bed, swung his legs around, and all at once, it hit him.

He was in the Tower before, in the world with the dream device. Back in the Tower, with his original team. Steve, Natasha, Bruce, Clint, and Thor. JARVIS was there.

But so was Strange. That’s what he kept feeling, what seemed so wrong. He couldn’t place it when he was there, but he _knew_ something was wrong. Why was Strange there? He didn’t meet Strange until years after the team moved out of the Tower, moved out and changed around.

And… now he remembered, suddenly, the other ones, the awakenings he’d had before the world with Strange and the dream device. Ones in the Tower with the team, where he passed out suddenly and then woke up again. One where they’d been kidnapped, and the team was different. Bruce gone, and Sam there. The team that happened after Ultron.

At the time, with the team in the Tower, he’d thought that was the real world, the one that made sense. Yet when he woke up in the world with Sam in it, those memories had clicked into place, too. After Ultron. Then he woke up back in the Tower again and went right back to thinking his original team was his most recent.

What the hell had been happening? The entire time, his head had felt foggy, unclear, like something was deliberately pressing down on him, muffling his senses and messing with his ability to think, to reason logically.

For some reason, whatever that was seemed to be gone now. He could suddenly remember everything, and he could think again. He understood the problems with the memories he had, things he hadn’t noticed or been able to place before.

“What the hell,” he muttered to himself, getting out of bed. He went into the bathroom pretty much on autopilot and started getting ready for the day, but his mind was working a mile a minute the entire time. 

The last he remembered, he’d been putting the dream device back on for Strange, who said he wanted to take some kind of magical readings while he wore it. Tony had been thinking that that world was the real one, although there was still the unexplained mystery of the first few strange awakenings. 

Now, he wasn’t sure what to think. That world was just as cloudy and unreal at the others, now that Tony could see clearly. He didn’t understand what had happened, what fog had lifted to allow him to recognize how odd it was for Strange to show up in the Tower with the original Avengers team, but now that he knew it, he couldn’t help but think that that world was just as fake—dream, hallucination, whatever the hell it was—as all the ones before it. 

Maybe this was finally the real world, since Tony could suddenly think so much more clearly. But he was wary of thinking that. He didn’t want to convince himself of it and end up ignoring little details that would point to another conclusion.

The best he could do, for now, was go about his day like normal. He ventured out of his rooms to find breakfast, greeting Sam and Vision in the kitchen when he saw them. Right, the team had changed after Ultron. That was why he had FRIDAY. Bruce was gone.

He passed Maximoff as he was coming out of the kitchen and didn’t miss the nasty look she threw him. She still seemed to hate him, and for a minute, he entertained the possibility that all of this insanity was her messing with him. 

He dismissed it quickly. Her specialty was fear, and since joining them she’d admitted freely that she didn’t have control over what she made people see. Aside from the nightmarish world where Tony was blue and glowing and Rhodey was in a wheelchair, none of what had been happening to Tony was all that frightening.

Except, of course, for the feeling that he was slowly being driven mad by the inability to tell what was real, but he didn’t think Wanda quite had the finesse for that sort of mental torture. Based on the vision he’d had before, her work was more obvious. An army in space and dead friends, not the idea that he couldn’t trust his own senses and wasn’t sure which reality he belonged in.

He made his way down to the lab and examined all of the equipment and half-finished projects he had scattered around. None of them resembled the dream device. When he asked FRIDAY, she said he hadn’t been working on anything new lately, just an upgrade for SI and some of the Avengers’ gear.

By early afternoon, he was starting to think that maybe all of it was some kind of freaky dream. He swore he had clear memories of it all, but they’d all felt wrong, and now that wrong feeling was gone. Life seemed to be normal here, he didn’t keep getting that sense that things were off or that he was missing something, and he hadn’t created any weird dream-viewers here. 

He didn’t think that was the case, but he couldn’t find any evidence otherwise. If the world with Strange was real, and he was currently wearing the dream device, why didn’t this feel like the previous time he’d put it on? He wasn’t cycling through different dreams. All of the people were sharp and clear and real. Life made sense.

Tony ended up taking a walk outside the Compound to clear his head. It had an extensive outdoor area, but he wanted away from the entire place, to somewhere relatively unfamiliar. He walked nearly three miles to a park. Maybe he’d find some answers there.

He shouldn’t have jinxed himself. He’d barely begun walking the paths through the park when there was a scream behind him. He whipped around, looking for the source, and spotted it almost instantly.

There was a woman standing on a parallel path about twenty yards behind him. She’d dropped her bag in favor of clutching her dog’s leash with both hands—the leash that was now straining upwards, as her Golden Retriever was floating in the air like a helium balloon.

It wasn’t technically the most bizarre thing Tony had ever seen, but it was easily in the top ten, maybe five. Other bystanders had clearly heard the woman scream and were running over to help, but stopping short at the sight of her levitating dog.

Tony joined them, and the crowd parted for Iron Man as he approached. “What happened?” he asked, figuring he’d start with the basics, though he didn’t expect much of an answer.

True to expectation, she just said, “He just started floating up! We were just walking and he did this! How do I get him down?”

It wasn’t like it was impossible; Tony had seen magic at work, he’d seen people and things float without any apparent physical force responsible for it. But this was, as far as he could tell, just an ordinary woman out walking her dog in the park. He had no explanation.

Still, he was Iron Man, and he couldn’t appear totally bewildered in front of all of these citizens. “Did he eat something? Step in something? Has he been acting strange?”

The dog, thankfully, didn’t seem too disturbed by the sudden lack of gravity. He floated in place, wagging his tail and attempting to strain forward to lick the nearest people. His owner, on the other hand, was becoming more hysterical by the second. “No! He didn’t eat anything strange, he wasn’t acting funny, nothing!”

Tony held his hands out. “Okay, look, there’s got to be an explanation for this. First step, we should bring him inside somewhere, where he can’t, um, float away.”

She nodded, and he began, “Okay, let’s—” but before he could get any further, she screamed again, and several of the bystanders gasped.

Her feet were lifting off the ground. She was rising up, as though her body had suddenly decided that gravity didn’t affect it. And there was nothing but sky above her.

She screamed in panic and twisted in the air like an astronaut floating in space, trying to scrabble for something to grab onto. A couple of the bystanders reached out to her, but before they could make contact, Tony barked out, “Don’t touch her!”

They looked shocked, but Tony didn’t have time to explain. He was already flicking his wrists and flexing his ankles, gauntlets and boots crawling their way into existence on his hands and feet. In the woman’s panic, she’d let go of the leash, so Tony fired up the thrusters and flew up to grab the dog first, then took hold of the woman’s hand on his way down with it.

She was still panicking, practically clawing at him as he grabbed her, so he took a firm grip on her wrist as they descended and tried to get her to look him in the eye. “Hey, hey, calm down, you’re going to be okay. What’s your name?”

She took a few more gasping breaths, but eventually responded with, “Katie.”

“Okay, Katie, you’re going to be okay. You and your dog. I’m going to get you both inside somewhere where we can figure this out, okay?”

By this time, Tony had landed back on the ground. He held Katie’s hand with one of his, pulling down on it so she floated more or less upright next to him, her feet almost touching the ground, as though she was walking. Feeling like he was holding the world’s strangest balloon in the other, he held onto the dog’s leash and it happily floated alongside them.

Katie reached over to clutch at Tony’s gauntleted hand with both of hers. When the crowd started to close in, Tony commanded them to back off. “Whatever this is, it spread from the dog to her. Anyone who touches her might have the same thing happen to them. You should all stay away.”

“What about you?” someone from the crowd called out.

Tony raised an eyebrow and waved the other gauntleted hand. “I think I’ll be okay.” The crowd laughed, relaxing, and Tony strode away from them, clunking in his boots and clutching Katie and her dog. He could only thank whatever random forces of luck were at work in the universe that the crowd was small, maybe twenty people total in the whole park, and they’d been calmed easily.

As soon as he was out of earshot of the crowd, he reached up with the hand holding the leash and tapped his earpiece. Thankfully, he wore it everywhere these days. “FRIDAY, contact the team and let them know I’m coming back in with something… really weird.”

“Will do, Boss,” she said in his ear, and Tony turned to Katie.

“It’s a couple miles back to my place,” he told her, “think you can hang on for a little flight? We’ll get there a lot faster.”

She regarded him with wide, wet eyes, but she nodded. He gave her a reassuring smile as he fired up the thrusters. Flying was a little awkward with her and the dog held to him, and it was strange to pull them along without compensating for their weight. He was also at a disadvantage for not being able to use the palm stabilizers, but he managed. Katie let out a little squeak of fear when they lifted off and accelerated toward the Compound, but mostly she kept her composure surprisingly well.

The team was waiting for him when he returned, and their expressions of mild annoyance and impatience at being called together on vague information turned to astonishment when he flew inside the doors with Katie and her dog.

“What the hell?” Clint asked, and that seemed to sum it up nicely.

“No idea,” Tony admitted. “Started with the dog, maybe fifteen minutes ago in the park. Then it spread to her about a minute later. Not sure if it had anything to do with her touching the leash.”

The others eyed him speculatively. “You’re not feeling anything?” Natasha asked, looking him up and down. 

Tony twitched his feet to retract the boots. “Nothing so far.” He shrugged and turned to Katie. “Let’s take you into one of the other rooms, and I can let you go, okay?” When she made another fearful noise and clutched him tighter, he smiled again. “There’s plenty of things for you to hang onto in there, and even if you let go, there’s a ceiling, there’s walls all around you. You’re not going anywhere, I promise.”

She nodded, and he moved toward one of the living areas. “This is Katie, by the way,” he told the others as they walked, “and her dog, um…”

“Thor,” she said, then colored immediately. Tony couldn’t help but chuckle, and he heard several of his teammates do the same.

When they got to the living area, Tony held his hand out so Katie could take hold of one of the chairs and pull herself into it. She wouldn’t stay in the sitting position without something to hold her down, so Tony strode across the room and grabbed a scarf that had been abandoned over the back of a couch. He passed it underneath the chair Katie was sitting on and handed the two ends to her, which she tied together over her lap to keep herself in place on the chair.

Tony tied the dog’s leash to the leg of one of the tables. It still floated about five feet off the ground, but it remained totally unbothered, happily wagging its tail. He reached up to scratch it behind the ears and it licked his hand.

“How are we doing on the coverage, FRI?” Tony asked aloud before any of the others could speak, and FRIDAY responded promptly.

“Videos posted on social media have already gained over ten thousand collective views,” she reported. “Most are calling it some kind of hoax, with some pointing to magic.”

“Of course,” Tony groaned. 

Steve stepped up, trying to take charge even though he was clearly as lost as the rest of them. “Wanda, can you do anything about this?”

Wanda reached out a hand and a red mist enveloped Katie, pushing her down into her chair for a moment. When it dissipated, Katie rose up again, stopped only by the scarf tied around her legs. Wanda shook her head. “I can physically move her to hold her down to the ground, but I can’t remove whatever is causing it in the first place. I don’t even know what it is.”

Tony didn’t think it was likely she’d be able to do anything even if they did know what was causing it, though he kept that thought to himself. “We need to figure out what the hell this is to be able to stop it.”

Sam shook his head. “I’ve got nothing.”

“Me neither,” Clint said, and Natasha also shook her head next to him.

Vision was watching Katie, intrigued but clearly also confused. “I have never seen, or heard of, anything like this.”

They all looked to Tony, clearly depending on him for some kind of scientific explanation or answer, one he didn’t have. Before he could open his mouth to answer them, however, FRIDAY spoke up again.

“Boss, we’ve got a problem. There are reports coming in from the park you were just at—someone called the police there, and now they’re saying there’s two people ‘floating away’ that are being held down by the crowd. One of them is an officer.”

“Oh no,” Steve said.

“Shit,” Tony added eloquently, jumping to his feet. “Sounds like it might be spreading.”

By the time he turned to look at Steve, FRIDAY was adding, “It’s just spread to a third person.”

“Shit,” Tony said again. “Okay, FRI, call the station and tell them they need to evacuate that park. Everyone there needs to get inside. If this spreads to them, they have to get to somewhere with a ceiling, at the very least. And send me down a suit, please.”

“On it, Boss.”

“We need to help,” Steve said, and Tony turned to him. “I don’t know how far this thing goes, but if people are outside and this happens, they could die if they get too far up. They could suffocate when the air gets too thin. Or what if it stops when they’re up there and they fall?”

Briefly, Tony had the insane thought that this was all too ridiculous to be real. There was no way this was happening, right? He must have been right before, that world with Strange was real, this was just a messed up dream he was reliving with his machine right now.

But then he thought of Strange’s most recent theory that these “dreams” could actually be alternate realities, and if so, the people in them were real. He couldn’t just abandon them.

Tony nodded. “You’re right, but only some of us can help. You three,” he indicated Steve, Clint, and Natasha, “if you go out there and this affects you, you’ll be no help at all. Just more people to rescue. Myself, Vision, and Wanda can move independently in the sky, we can go out and help, and even if it spreads to us we can stay safe. Sam, too, even if you can’t maneuver quite like us you can still be eyes in the sky, watching out for more people.”

Steve looked frustrated, but he clearly agreed. “Okay, you four head out then. We can stay here and keep an eye on the news reports.”

“We should get in contact with the police in other cities, too,” Natasha added, “in case this spreads even farther.”

They all parted ways at that, going to gear up and head out. Tony, Sam, Vision, and Wanda flew back out to the park together.

It was pandemonium by the time they got there. Tony spotted at least five distinct spots where small crowds were gathered and clearly holding someone down, yet he also saw two people freely rising in the air. “Vision, grab those two. Sam, Wanda, we need to get the rest of these people out of here before there are too many for us to handle.”

Vision flew off to rescue the two floaters, while Tony, Wanda, and Sam landed in the park and started trying to herd the crowds away. There was a police car parked along the path, and a small crowd near it; when Tony headed for them, he saw that they were holding an officer by his arms, and he was floating a few inches off the ground.

“Very weird day, huh officer?” Tony said as he approached in the suit, trying to lighten the mood. The officer, to his credit, was remaining fairly calm. 

“Certainly not something I’ve seen before,” he said, with a strained smile.

Tony grabbed him from the crowd and pulled him over to his own patrol car, opening the passenger door to push him inside. “Do you think a citizen can drive your car? I don’t think you can drive like this, and we really need to get all of these people out of here. I’m not sure if it’s the space here, or something contagious, or what, but we’ve got to get people out of the open areas.”

“Normally I’d say no, but I think considering the circumstances, I can handle it,” the officer replied, and Tony nodded. He enlisted a bystander to climb into the driver’s seat of the car, and piled three others into the backseat.

By the time he’d finished instructing the rest of his small group to find shelter, the park was mostly clear. He didn’t have even a second to enjoy their success, however, before Steve’s voice was coming through their comms.

“Tony, Sam, Wanda, Vision. Bad news. This is happening all over the country. It’s spreading fast.”

“Fuck,” Tony swore out loud, and it was a testament to the seriousness of the situation that no one commented on his language. “Anything being done? We can’t fly all around the country.”

“There’s a nationwide emergency alert being sent out, telling people to get inside buildings as soon as possible. But people are panicking.”

“Of course they are,” Tony said, “shit. I don’t—”

“Worldwide,” came Natasha’s voice, “there are reports coming in from other countries now, too.”

Tony shook his head, at a loss. “We need to regroup,” Steve said, “you guys should head back. We can try to come up with a plan from here.”

“Okay. Heading back now.” Tony didn’t want to leave when he knew there were people out there who needed saving, but fuck, this was happening way faster, and on a much bigger scale, than they could ever hope to deal with.

They’d gotten all the way back to the Compound and inside before Tony felt a sudden lurch and started drifting in the suit without activating the thrusters at all. “Uh, guys? Think it’s happening to me.”

“Damn,” Sam said as he folded up his wings, looking over at Tony, who was now firing the thrusters in tiny bursts to keep himself in place. It was a very strange feeling, being weightless. “How long before it spreads to the rest of us?”

Tony shook his head. “Who knows, but we should be prepared. I’ve got some stuff in my lab that we can at least set up up here, use to monitor everything. And I’ll grab some cords, for, you know, tying ourselves down.” Before he could contemplate the insanity of that statement, he took off for the lab.

Flying was very odd without the effects of gravity weighing on him. All of his usual calculations and instinctive movements took the pull of gravity into account, and adjusting for the lack of it was proving difficult. Just as he got into the lab, he managed to accidentally slam himself upwards into the ceiling at just the right angle to activate the suit retraction. It folded itself back into a small piece along his back, leaving Tony floating up at the top of the lab in just his t-shirt and jeans.

He twisted, cursing. If this happened to Wanda or Vision, they would be able to just hold themselves to the floor no problem, but Tony needed to suit to do it. Strange would be able to stand, no doubt, between his magic bullshit and that cloak of his…

Tony was about to reactivate the suit when it hit him like a freight train.

_Strange._ How the hell had he missed it?

He’d thought that the other world was odd because he knew Strange even though he was still living in the Tower with his original team. How had he missed something so obvious? Had waking up here, feeling like his head was clear, really thrown him off that much?

He didn’t meet Strange until years after the original team split up. And then split up further. He didn’t meet Strange until well after Ultron, when the Compound was empty. Just like in the dream he thought he’d viewed. An empty Compound because of the Civil War. The Accords. The fight in Germany, and then Siberia. None of that had happened yet in this world, and yet he remembered it. He shouldn’t know Strange yet. Not in that world, and not in this one.

Had he really thought this world was the real one because the foggy feeling was gone? Because he retained some memories of the other worlds this time?

Every world, every dream, had felt totally real while he was in it. This one was no different. There was no way to tell from inside whether they were reality or not, because every time, his mind tricked him into thinking that where he stood was solid ground, that the world around him was really there.

Except… that wasn’t always true. Suddenly, clearly, new memories resolved out of the haze. One particular dream-world he’d woken up in, where everything seemed wrong. Things were out of place. Steve was left-handed instead of right. Clint and Natasha switched seats. 

And there was something else he realized in the moment: JARVIS. In the world where his teammates passed around the dream-viewer like a hot potato, JARVIS had been there at the beginning. All of that day, from the moment he’d discovered the dream device was missing and gone looking for it, he’d felt like he was missing something obvious. Why hadn’t he asked JARVIS for help? Why hadn’t JARVIS offered help of his own when he realized Tony had lost it? And how did Steve get into the lab and steal something anyway, when JARVIS was there watching?

It was almost like JARVIS wasn’t really there. Like he was only there when Tony was thinking about him. Like a dream. Yet the other scenarios had been like dreams too, and all of them had felt perfectly normal, none of that weird wrongness that had plagued the one with the lost device.

What was different about that one? Why did he feel that something was wrong there, and nowhere else?

The team had been the original one there, just like many of the other times. But they weren’t the only ones. Loki was there, too, messing with him. 

_Loki_. Loki had been there, being his dramatic self, but that wasn’t right, was it? Loki had never been banished to Earth. He’d never lived around the team and caused general mischief with them. Why was that world different?

A memory came to him. _Do you dream about me as well?_

Loki had asked pointedly about his dreams. _Before_ knowing what the device Tony had created was. After all of this insanity started. 

“Son of a bitch,” Tony said out loud, floating on the ceiling while the world fell apart around him. The anger rose in him, and before he could stop himself, he was shouting out, “LOKI!”

There was a flash, a green light seemed to spread through the room, and then without warning, Tony fell, gravity once again working perfectly well. He landed hard on his stomach, knocking the air out of him, and had to lie on the floor for a minute to get his breath back.

When he was able to breathe again, he looked up to see the Trickster standing in front of him, grinning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope no one thinks I’m cheating by using the strange dream thing to be able to put all of these prompts into one chapter. I am thinking that we might make a slightly more cohesive story now that we’ve got something of an established plot, but after all, that’s not up to me. I will make it work, whatever you all decide.
> 
> Congrats to anyone who’s seen one of the worst episodes of TOS that I referenced here.
> 
> Please remember to review the rules for commenting, found in chapter 1. Note for this chapter: I changed the time limit for comments after each chapter from 3 days to 2 to give myself more time to actually write and edit the chapter while still hopefully keeping to the planned upload schedule. I’m hoping this won’t be a problem for anyone, since this time I think I got maybe a single comment on day 3 after posting, almost all of them were on day 1. There's not a hard cutoff on this, so if it's been about 2 days and you want to comment, don't be afraid.


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